Kirk Morrison, also known as Captain Kirk, or the “Lizard King“, is a professional poker player, born on April 14th in Wichita, Kansas, USA. He was interested in poker since his early childhood and by his 20’s, after going to Las Vegas with the intention to play blackjack and losing $3,000 in less than 2 hours, decided to start playing professional poker. He spent a lot of his time in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas playing his favorite game which supported his life.
In his early poker days, Kirk Morrison had lots of participations in different games, but most importantly – numerous wins. Later, in the 1990’s he joined a group of young and ambitious card players like himself – such as Daniel Negreanu, Layne Flack and Allen Cunningham. His first major success came in 1994 when he attended the 25th Annual World Series of Poker and finished 3rd with a prize of $72,300.
Since then Kirk Morrison has achieved many powerful wins, but there’s no doubt that the most important was the 1998 World Series of Poker event where he got his first bracelet and more than $148,000 in the $1,500 seven-card stud tournament. Years later, though, his interest in poker started fading away. So he began to seek pleasure in other areas of gambling, such as sports betting. It seemed that he didn’t have much success in that area, because he lost quite a lot of money. And that was one of the reasons why he moved to New Zealand, where he stayed until 2006, even though his stay was supposed to last only 4 months. He never anticipated he was going to fall in love with the smoothly going ways of the island, so he ended up spending there 7 years. The first few years in New Zealand Kirk Morrison kept away from playing poker but eventually decided to take part in some Australian tournaments.
At one of those tournaments in 2006 he met his old friend Daniel Negreanu who had traveled all the way to Australia/New Zealand from the US, just to seek him out and persuade him to come back to their country and start playing poker again. And that’s what Kirk did.Since his return, Kirk Morrison has had four successful cashes in WPT tournaments and five cashes alone in the 2007 WSOP, which have brought him over $2 million in the first six months of the year. As of 2007 Kirk Morrison’s total winnings exceed $2,900,000.