Paul Phillips (poker player)
American poker player
Paul Phillips (born August 9, 1972, in San Francisco, California) is an American software developer, entrepreneur and poker player.
Programming
Phillips wrote the Boa web server while attending the University of California, San Diego, but no longer maintains it. In 1994, one of his colleagues at college discovered he had an interest in blackjack and subsequently introduced him to poker.
In 1996, he became Chief Technical Officer for Go2Net. This success is the basis of his nickname Dot-com.
Phillips subsequently started working on the Scala compiler and standard library. He is co-founder of Akka.io (then known as Typesafe, later known as Lightbend), a company specializing in the production and support of an open-source platform for software development based on Scala and Akka. He left Lightbend in 2013 over differences in the architecture of the language, collections library and compiler.
Poker
Phillips was barred from competing in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 2001 due to comments he made about the way in which the Horseshoe split entry money between players and casino employees. Despite being reinstated as a competitor later on during the 2001 WSOP, he only played one event in 2002 (placing 2nd to John Juanda in the $1,500 triple draw lowball Ace to Five event).
The public source identifies “Paul Phillips (poker player)” as american poker player. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Paul, Phillips and poker.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3181630. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1994, 1996 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Phillips (poker player)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.