The House of Cards
In a recent interview with the Daily mail newspaper, it emerged that a family in Birmingham have decided to all become professional poker players.
The mother and father player regularly and have had scores running to over £10,000, and their two sons also earn money solely from poker.
The eldest recently won a tournament at the Dusk Till Dawn poker room for £27,000, while his younger brother picked up £9,200 for a deep run in the UK and Ireland Poker Tour just a few months ago.
While the enthusiasm of this family is admirable, the newspaper reports that they play an average of three live tournaments per week.
As tournaments are perhaps the most unstable form of poker income, and sticking to live play massively limits the amount of volume they can put in each week, the story seems somewhat fanciful.
They claim to have a secret mathematical formula that is the key to their success, so let us hope this isn’t a case of simply having a little upswing, and then the whole family quitting their job in the belief that they are now all poker masters.
Le’ts hope for them that their secret mathematical formula is correct – (Photo Daily Mail)
Daylight Robbery
Harnam Matharu had finally earned his golden opportunity of a huge score in a poker tournament, as he sat with the chip lead in the Fallsview Poker Classic at Niagara Falls.
1st place money was $200,000 but sadly for Matharu, his odds of picking up that 1st place money were about to lengthen.
With a couple of players in the tournament having witnessed a fellow player being robbed of $5,000 outside his motel room weeks earlier, they thought the face of Matharu looked familiar.
One of them managed to sneakily take a picture of the potential robber, before mailing it to the victim, who confirmed it looked very much like the culprit.
Police swooped in shortly after, arresting Matharu, leaving his stack to be blinded off.
He still managed a creditable 3rd place for $80,000 despite being sat in a jail cell.
Sam Trickett and his Ferrari
After crashing his prized Ferrari, and not having any significant results for a few months, it’s fair to say that Sam Trickett isn’t running great.
He tweeted a picture of the damaged car, and confirmation that he was unhurt, and promptly received humorous tweets back such as “Should have re-evaluated on the turn” and a little salt in the wound from Daniel Negreanu “How are you running? Looks like me slowrolling you is the least of your worries these days!”
He should have re-evaluated on the turn
The Generosity of a Champion
Last years WSOP main event champion has shown the selfless, caring side of the poker world recently, by giving away $250,000 of his prize money to the ‘Raising for Effective Giving’ charity.
This charity is set up and run by poker players who want to turn their fortunate position into positive acts of goodwill for those in need.
They ensure every cent donated is put to the best use possible.
This act of generosity by Martin Jacobson further underlines what a great and worthy world champion he is for the game.
The Main Event champion is giving away $250,000 of his prize money