Eric Lynch was born on October 20th, 1978 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. When he was jus a child, at the age of one, his parents moved to Olathe, Kan. Eric Lynch has spent all his life there as he went to school, graduated and still resides in the same city. Card games were not uknown to Eric Lynch. As a child he used to play cards with some friends for pennies or marbles, and his family enjoyed hand of spades, as well as board games.
Being a former engineer, Eric Lynch plays poker quite well. He is a man who goes against almost every preconceived notion of young internet poker players. In the beginning, Eric Lynch started playing poker just occasionally on the internet, asking a friend for advice. He registered himself with the name “Rizen” online, but occasionally uses another nickname too: “Snkybluffalo". He uses them mostly when playing online at the PokerStars or the Full Time Poker. At first, everything looked easy and fun, because he was winning regulary. Eric Lynch puts those days in words like this: "I was doing pretty well at first, and I think that led me to believe that I was better than I actually was at the time,". However, things got pretty rough later and Eric Lynch was forced to look for help. In order to improve he turned for help to David Sklansky’s book. It looks like that helped, because his first big success came soon in an $11 re-buy event at PokerStars.com. Eric Lynch won the tournament and turned his $14,000 prize into buy-ins for higher-stakes tournaments. After taking down the PartyPoker.com's Friday special for $45,000, there was no stopping him. At the 2006 World Series Of Poker (WSOP) the Internet “wonder-boy” proved his live-game skills by finishing 24th position in the Main Event for almost $500,000 and finishing third in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Hold'em event for more than $100,000.
Although his name is now associated mainly to online poker Eric Lynch has bigger priorities than competing all the time. He dedicates his spare time to his wife, Shauna, his son, Corbin, and daughter, Kira. The family enjoys spending time together and to ensure Eric Lynch is never gone from them for too long, he keeps his traveling to a minimum by competing in only a few live tournaments each year. Also together with Jon Turner, Jon Van Fleet and Matthew Hilger he has a book entitled Winning Poker Tournaments: One Hand at a Time Volume.
As of 2008, his total live tournament winnings exceed $860,000.
