Background
Ashby picked up poker at his local tennis club, as well as playing for pennies with his father.
Ashby picked up poker at his local tennis club, as well as playing for pennies with his father.
He was given the name "Chufty" by his friends at University, due to Ashby"s frequency of using the term "chuffed". In the mid nineties, he played his first tournament, a £10 Study tournament. A few years later he earned entry into the Aussie Millions.
By the end of the week he had lost it all.
Since then, he"s accrued over half a million dollars in live tournament winnings including final table finishes at the 2007 Manchester GUKPT and the 2009 Aussie Millions, the latter of which earned him A$150,000 for his seventh-place finish. However, Ashby openly admits that he needs to work on his live game, and is much better known as an online player, in particular on Black Belt Poker where was recently acquired as one of their sponsored pros in September 2010.
Ashby can often been seeing playing on the site in some of the highest stakes available, and against many of the biggest names in poker. Foreign a while, they played in the same games, but eventually realised that it was a pointless exercise and decided to avoid each other from there on in.
As well as Grundy, Ashby considers France"s David Benyamine to be the best Omaha player in Europe, although he cites Philosophy Ivey as the only player he would consider sitting out against.
This success garnered him much interest, in particular on the Two Plus Two forums where the nosebleed stakes are avidly followed. He followed that success less than two weeks later by finishing 2nd in World Series of Poker Event #43, the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. World Championship, netting him $378,027 in winnings. He was successful out of a field of 480 players, collecting his first WCOOP bracelet along with $185,760 in winnings.