Amateur Poker Player Lives the Dream
Over at the Everest Poker blog today we got to see a cool story about a rags-to-riches poker player from Finland named Voitto Rintala. Better known in the poker player’s circuit as “Random Eyes” (it’s more obvious when you see him in person), Rintala was once just your average amateur online poker player, until he entered Everest’s Live the Dream competition.
Last week Rintala’s story took an amazing twist, and he was within reach of his first-ever WSOP bracelet (think of it as a wearable trophy, that you receive in ADDITION TO hundreds of thousands of dollars). We’ll get to that in a bit however, as the story of how he got there is pretty interesting, too.
The competition had Rintala and 200 other aspiring poker players posting to blogs, making videos and selling themselves for a chance at a once-in-a-lifetime prize: a one-year sponsorship from Everest Poker that included buy-ins for seats at the illustrious World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
Thanks to that competition, Rintala and 12 other poker players from across Europe were invited to become sponsored players, and will travel the world for a year on the Everest Poker dime. This week they received their free entry into WSOP. Other events and poker promotions, like the Spanish Poker Tour, and many others, will soon follow.
But this week was all about Las Vegas and the WSOP, where Rintala and the other 12 Everest Dream Team players were competing for the final table in this world-renown event.
As Rintala’s teammates fell to bad hands and bad luck throughout the week, he kept on keeping on in his assigned WSOP “$1,500 No Limit Texas Holdem” event, and found himself with a massive pile of chips by midweek. About 120,000, to be precise, which is almost double the average take of 84,000.
The take was good enough to get him to the final table of “event 52,” and Rintala was within a few seats of finishing as the first player on his team to win a WSOP bracelet. It just has to be those eyes that’s giving him the edge, right?
But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Unlike the movies, this story has a somewhat sad ending. Rintala was ousted early on at the final table, and finished 9th. His reward? A cool $60,000 or so, which really isn’t that bad considering his buy-in was paid, in full, by Everest.
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