Born in Lebanon in 1966, Joseph Hachem moved to Australia with his family when he was six years old.
He has always been a family-centered character, and did everything he could to provide his four children everything they needed for a full healthy life. In that respect, he ran a chiropractic business which had been quite successful indeed, until a rare blood disorder prevented him from using his hands for what he needed them most.
Even though it first looked like one of those perverted jokes that fate sometimes plays on people, the problem proved to be a blessing in disguise.
Forced to look for a livelihood elsewhere, Joe became a mortgage broker and started eying poker more and more seriously as a source of steady income. He first played it on a semi professional level, in live games in Melbourne, and online at Poker Stars.
Even though he never used PokerStars as a gateway to big live events like his now fellow Poker Stars pros, Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer, he is part of the PokerStars team to this very day.
It soon became obvious to him that there was a lot more potential hidden in poker games than he first anticipated, and thus becoming a full time professional made perfect sense for someone endowed with his poker skills.
According to his official website, he’s always nurtured dreams about making it big in the WSOP one day, but never quite took those dreams seriously. 2005 would be the year all that would change.
He bought into a smaller WSOP event with his own money, that year, where he finished tenth, and pocketed about $25,000. Even though it was something he’d never really planned, by then it made sense that he use $10,000 of that money to buy into the main event. He took a chance alright, but it was a risk that would pay out handsomely at the end of the event. He later went on to win the 2005 WSOP main event, in a heads up against Steve Dannenmann who he’d been battling for days before that. Joe had 7,3o and Dannenmann had A,3 which made him a preflop favorite. The flop would change all that though as it came 6,5,4 giving Hachem a straight that could be equaled at best by Dannenmann, if another 7 had come on a later street.
Hachem went all in, and Dannenmann called, which was indeed the correct move to make under the circumstances (he had top pair on the turn and an open ended straight draw). Unfortunately for him, the only card that could’ve tied the game never came, thus Hachem became the 2005 WSOP main event champion, outlasting the biggest field ever in the history of professional poker.
2006 was another good year in his professional career. He only reached 238th place in the main event, however, he placed 2nd and 4th respectively in two of the smaller WSOP events.
In December that same year, he won his first WPT title, bagging over 2 million dollars in the process.
Currently, he travels the globe in search of the biggest poker events out there, so one never knows when his name will pop up all over the news again.
Joe Hachem is playing at Poker Stars!
