Vince Van Patten:
Celebrity Poker Player

Celebrity Poker player Vince Van Patten was born into a family involved in entertainment as the youngest son of the famous actor, Dick Van Patten. At the early age of 9, Vince got his first personal experience in the entertainments industry, a commercial for Colgate toothpaste, that was later followed by more than thirty other commercials at the request of his father's manager.

Vince Van Patten, is one of Hollywood's celebrity Poker player shining stars, he has tried his hand in some of the largest cash poker games and tournaments all over the world. He has been nicknamed "King of the Hollywood Home Games".

This celebrity poker player is the current emcee and announcer for the World Poker Tour on television, although his work as a poker entrepreneur is just one side of his diverse life that includes acting, producing, directing and he is laso a world renound tennis professional.

Throughout the 1970s poker player Vince Van Patten guest-starred in over 36 television series which include Adam 12, Bonanza, Medical Center, High Chaparral, and The Courtship of Eddie's Father. At age 14, he co-starred with Kurt Russell, Cloris Leachman and Fred MacMurray in the Disney comedy, Charlie and the Angel. At 16, he got a regular part in Apple's Way, a series where he plays an architect's son who give up the big city life to raise his family in small-town...Appleton, Iowa.

Three years later this poker celebrity co-starred in The Bionic Boy, a two-hour spinoff of the ever-popular series, starring Lee Majors, The Six Million Dollar Man. Afterwards, came two extremely different roles: one as a surfer bully in Gidget's Summer Reunion, the second with his brother James, as a jailed hillbilly brother in Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission, a television project filmed in Yugoslavia with screen stars the likes of Telly Savalas and Ernest Borgnine.

His real passion was tennis: he was a natural born competitor. In 1978 his game was so strong that he was offered the starring role in a Paramount film called Players; he didn't get the part, but this encouraged Vince to test his mettle at Wimbledon. After three months of practice matches, without a single win, Vince returned home, continued practicing , and within a year he was listed among the Top 30 professional players in the world.

In 1979 Vince Van Patten was awarded the Association of Tennis Professionals' Rookie of the Year award. The climax of his tennis career arrived in 1981 when he beat John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis, Jose Louis Clerk, winning the $300,000 Seiko World Super Tennis tournament in Tokyo.

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