World Poker Tour

ANYONE CAN PLAY... AND WIN

As much as you enjoy and excel at your weekend game of golf or tennis, chances are slim that you’ll ever meet Tiger Woods on the PGA tour or hit balls with Andre Agassi at Wimbledon – let alone beat them.

But, if you play your cards right, you could sit at the table with the Tiger Woods of poker, Phil Ivey, or fellow pros who are now household names thanks to their star turns on the Travel Channel’s megahit TV series, the World Poker Tour ( WPT).

"If I sit down and play Kasparov a hundred games in a row in chess, I won't win one unless he has a stroke in the middle of one of the games," says professional poker player Annie Duke. "But in poker, that's not true. You can take the Kasparov of poker and sit him down with somebody who is a good amateur, and the amateur could win on a given night."

It could happen. And it has. Indeed, many of these "Kasparovs" were bounced from WPT play by far lesser luminaries during season one of the WPT, and the trend continues as WPT films its second season to begin airing on March 3, 2004. Amateurs who anted up as little as $1 in online satellite play have finished at one of the WPT tournament final tables and walked away tens of thousands of dollars richer. College students and recent grads have racked up as much as a quarter of a million. And an unknown even captured first place at a WPT final table, earning a seat worth $25,000 at the series finale championship where the prize pool totaled over $2.5 million in 2003. Here are just a few of the Cinderella stories from the WPT’s first two seasons. Could you star in the sequel to one of them?

They might want to change their majors...

Two Dans, both students, put a nice dent in their tuitions with their WPT season one winnings. Dan Coupal, at 22 the youngest ever player to make a final table on the WPT, a law student in Saskatchewan, Canada came in 6th in season one on a cruise ship, taking home $43,975. Dan Rentzer, a business student from Santa Monica, CA, placed second to pro Gus Hansen at the Commerce Casino's L.A. Poker Classic season one tournament and won $253,595.

Just a lark

Tim Lark, a flooring company manager from Dayton, Ohio (birthplace of WPT host Mike Sexton) paid $1 to enter an online satellite tournament, beat 2000 people for a seat at the cruise, and ended up in fifth place, with $52,770. Randy Berger, a Mesa, Arizona-based finance manager, had to pay 12 times that (a whopping $12) to enter the online tournament that catapulted him to the final table at season two’s new tournament, the Borgata Poker Open in Atlantic City, where he raked in $41,124.

Betting more than money

Rick Casper, a Las Vegas real estate agent, made a bet with friends that if he came in third or better in season two’s Ultimate Poker Classic that he’d get married on the beach in Aruba. He came in a very respectable sixth, won $43,860, and still tied the knot. Another amateur, Ted Harrington, a Rhode Island-based contractor born in Ireland, edged past Rick to fifth place in the same tournament, winning $68,920.

Finnish Finish

But the real proof in the pudding is the stunning victory of Finland’s Juha Helppi at the season one Ultimate Poker Classic. This amateur – the Captain of the Finnish national paintball team – beat the pros heads up for a WPT Championship entry worth $25,000 in addition to his first prize winnings of $50,000.

The World Poker Tour inaugurates its second season on the Travel Channel on March 3, 2004, (9 – 11p.m. ET/PT), with a special sneak preview airing slated for February 4, 2004. Viewers can look forward to more than 30 hours of new poker programming including fourteen high-stakes tournaments and several bonus themed episodes.

WPT Information Page