The European Poker Tour hit London over September and the beginning of October, finding its place amongst the myriad of other poker events also taking place. There were big cash prizes up for grabs, but not everybody was motivated by pure financial gain. As part of the Tour, PokerStars also hosted a charity tournament, the proceeds of which were donated to Cancer Research UK.
The European Poker Tour is a televised series of poker tournaments, with a number of different stops in beautiful cities around the European continent and the United Kingdom. We tend to only hear about the Main Events of each stop, but there are actually a bunch of different tournaments taking place in each city. As you might expect, most of these are simply different formats or different poker variants, but PokerStars also likes to occasionally throw something quite different into the mix, such as their mixed poker-golf tournament in Vilamoura.
In London the tournament with a difference was a charity fundraiser tournament, hosted to generate money for Cancer Research UK. It was a £120 rebuy event, with £10 of every buy-in being set aside for cancer research. This alone generated £6,460 for the charity, but PokerStars didn’t stop there. They set up a special account online where PokerStars players could transfer money to as a donation, and promised to match all donations 100%. This generosity on the part of PokerStars and the players themselves eventually raised over £20,000, or over $30,000 USD, for Cancer Research UK.
Of course, even with the money for charity taken from the prize pool, there was still a very respectable amount of cash up for grabs. Poker players have shown themselves to be very generous when it comes to those less fortunate than themselves and other good causes, but as far as the other players on the table are concerned, it’s still a pretty cut-throat game. True to this the players battled it out through hours of play, and eventually Arnoud van der Warf of Holland was the last man standing, earning £20,000 for his efforts.
The official final eight are as follows:
1. Arnoud van der Werf – £20,000
2. Tim Hong Wong – £13,000
3. Salih Adem – £9,000
4. Amir Sonsino – £7,000
5. Nicholas Aitken – £5,000
6. Claudiu Bucharest – £4,000
7. Jan Kacur – £3,000
8. Billy Young – £2,000