Citing a Living Poker Player's Biography: What Actually Works
If you're trying to cite Phil Ivey's biography in any formal context, you're going to run into the same problems I've seen come up repeatedly on forums and in editorial offices. He's still alive, he's still playing, and his career is ongoing. That means standard biography citation templates break down pretty quickly. Here's how to handle it without ending up with a reference that falls apart under review.
Phil Ivey Biography Citation: The Practical Guide
The core issue is that most citation generators and style guides assume the subject of a biography is deceased or that their life's story is complete. Phil Ivey turned professional in 1999, has over $14 million in live tournament winnings, and is still active as of 2025. That creates several specific citation problems. First, you need to pick your source carefully. The most commonly cited sources are his Wikipedia page, the Global Poker Index records, and interviews from outlets like PokerNews or CardPlayer. Each has different citation implications. For Wikipedia, the standard format is straightforward. You cite the page title, the retrieval date, and the URL. Here's what that looks like in APA 7th edition:
"Ivey, P." (2025, March 15). Phil Ivey. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ivey The retrieval date is critical here because Wikipedia pages are constantly edited. A citation without a retrieval date is basically worthless for a living subject, since any fact you pulled could have been changed or removed since you accessed it. I've had editors reject references specifically because the retrieval date was missing, and they were right to do so. For the Global Poker Index or poker database sources, you'd format it more like a dataset citation:
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Global Poker Index. (2025). Phil Ivey player profile. Retrieved from https://www.pokerindex.org MLA style works differently. You'd list his name as the subject of the article, the site name, the publisher if there is one, the publication date, and the URL. MLA doesn't require a retrieval date for online sources unless the content is likely to change, which in this case it absolutely does, so I'd include it anyway. Chicago style has two approaches depending on whether you're using notes-bibliography or author-date. The notes version would look like a footnote referencing the specific page you consulted with the date you looked at it. The bibliography entry is cleaner but still needs that retrieval date for living subjects on editable platforms.
Here's the edge case I keep running into. Sometimes you need to cite a specific claim from Phil Ivey's biography — like his education at UC Berkeley or a particular tournament result — and the information appears on multiple sources with conflicting dates. I was working on a reference piece last year where Ivey's first major cash prize was listed as 2002 on one source and 2003 on another. The Wikipedia page had been updated, but an older interview site still had the original date. I resolved it by checking the tournament records directly through the World Series of Poker archive, then cited that primary source instead of any secondary biography. The workaround is simple: whenever possible, trace the biographical claim back to the original event record rather than relying on a biographical summary. It takes more time, maybe twenty minutes per disputed fact instead of two, but it saves you from propagating errors. One thing people consistently get wrong is treating a third-party biography page like it's an authoritative primary source. Sites like FamousBirthdays.com or Biography.com have their own editorial standards, and they've been known to repeat unverified details. I'd recommend using them only as starting points and then verifying through poker-specific databases or reputable news archives. Another common mistake is citing a video interview as a biography source. If someone interviewed Phil Ivey in 2018 and he mentioned his early life, that's a primary source — it's him talking. But it's not a biography. Citing it as one conflates the source type and weakens your reference. Use it as a quote source, not a biographical fact source, unless you're clear about what you're actually citing.
The biggest limitation of this whole approach is that living subjects require ongoing maintenance of your citations. A reference you build today will need updating if the source material changes, which it will. If you're compiling a bibliography for a long-term project, plan to revisit your Phil Ivey citations at least every six months. It's not ideal, but it's the reality of citing someone whose career is still being written. For most practical purposes, combining a Wikipedia citation with a retrieval date and one or two primary poker database sources gives you a solid, defensible reference. Anything more elaborate than that is usually overkill unless you're writing academic work that demands it.
