Montel Williams, the Commissioner of the International Team Poker League, is an Emmy award-winning talk-show host, decorated former U.S. naval intelligence officer, international best-selling author, motivational speaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. 

He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Living Well, Climbing Higher, and Mountain, Get Out of My Way, and co-authored the New York Times bestseller, Bodychange.

The Montel Williams Show, which ran for 17 years, is one of the most influential and longest running programs of its kind in television history. Focusing on a broad range of personal, family, and social issues, Montel’s nationally syndicated show landed him the 1996 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show host, in addition to nominations for both Outstanding Talk Show in 2001 and Outstanding Talk Show Host in 2002.

Prior to hosting his own television show, Montel was a special-duty intelligence officer in the navy, specializing in cryptology. As a Naval Academy graduate, he received a number of military awards and citations during his naval career. Before attending the Academy, he enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating from high school in Baltimore, Maryland.

In 1999, Montel announced his diagnosis with MS, a complex and often debilitating autoimmune disease that affects the body’s central nervous system. To raise both awareness and funding for MS research, he created the Montel Williams MS Foundation. In 2006, Montel became a National Spokesperson for the Partnership for Prescription Assistance, a major industry campaign to make prescription drugs accessible to all Americans.

In addition to his latest talk show project, Living Well With Montel, his docu-soap, Montel’s All In, takes the former talk show host in yet another innovative direction with cameras rolling in Vegas and beyond to capture the blow by blow of creating the International Team Poker League. As the ITPL’s Commissioner, Montel will align with the heaviest hitters in Vegas before rolling into casinos worldwide to find the best players to represent the league. Montel’s All In will make a huge splash, turning the poker world into an international playing field of huge opportunity and teammanship by bringing together the biggest players, creating the biggest pots, and fulfilling the biggest dreams.

The ITPL was born on a Virgin Airways napkin in March 2008, as Montel returned to the States from the World Poker Cup in Wales where he played on Team USA with poker stars, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Chad Brown, Tom Keller, Jamie Gold, and Robert Williamson. Less than a year before, he had stunned the poker world with his debut at the 2007 World Series of Poker, coming out of nowhere to hold the chip lead for most of day one. Montel continued playing the game while writing this new chapter in his life, envisioning how he could rock the world of poker as he had rocked the ratings of national television for so many years.

By the time Montel’s plane touched down on the tarmac and every cocktail napkin in sight had been scrawled upon, the ITPL’s basic framework was in place. The Commissioner next called upon one of his closest business associates, Richard August Flack, to become the Commander of the ITPL. Within a short amount of time, the top players in the gaming industry - both online and land-based - were recruited to turn the dream of the ITPL into a reality never before seen in poker world, offering any given person, on any given day, the opportunity to be the biggest thing in poker.