at the highest stakes game in history in, of course, Las Vegas.
And he won that bankroll with just three fives.
Esfandiari was one of 48 poker pros who agreed to put down $1 million each to enter the “Big One for One Drop” poker playoff. The difference was that he beat them all over three days.
Esfandiari said he had some doubts about entering. Several of the top players went away with more than the $1 million they plunked down to enter—but most went away with nothing.
Originally, Esfandiari, 33, decided to pass up the poker competition and do a TV commentary on the tournament for ESPN and some guaranteed money.
The poker industry needed the “Big One for One Drop” to restore some vitality to the game, which has suffered in the wake of a government crackdown on online poker sites. In fact, the operator of one of the biggest poker websites was arrested just days before the Las Vegas tournament started.
The plan for Esfandiari changed when he decided to round up his investors and enter the tournament at the last minute. “Believe it or not, I never once thought about the money,” Esfandiari said after he won $18,346,673.
The tournament was the brainchild of Guy Laliberte, the founder of he Cirque du Soleil circus in Quebec whose shows are ubiquitous on the Vegas Strip. Laliberte, whom Forbes ranks as the 11th richest Canadian with a worth of $2.6 billion, saw the event as a way to both bring excitement back to poker and to benefit the charity One Drop Foundation, which he founded to promote access to clean water around the world. The Foundation gained $5.3 million or 11.11 percent from the show.
The one person who benefited the most, though, was Esfandiari, who was born in Tehran and came to the United States with his family at age 9 in 1988. He lived in a largely Hispanic neighborhood in San Jose, California, and changed his name from Amir to Antonio at age 19 to fit in better,
He started out as a magician while a teenager and was making good money as a performer at corporate events before being attracted to poker at the age of 20. He has since given up magic.
This last week in Las Vegas, the last man sitting with Esfandiari was Sam Trickett, a 25-year-old Englishman who once played professional soccer and is regarded as one of the game’s young stars.
Trickett was fading to begin with and running out of options in the Texas Hold’em event when he went all in against what would be a winning hand of three fives. Trickett was trying to draw to a diamonds flush, but both the last two cards flipped over were hearts, touching off a celebration by Esfandiari’s supporters, who held him aloft. Trickett didn’t walk away alone; he was accompanied by more than $10 million.
The final table of eight went quickly, too quickly for Brian Rast, a good friend of Esfandiari who finished sixth and had to settle for $1.6 million on his $1 million investment.
Tournament poker has always drawn a strange assortment of characters, back to the days when guys with nicknames such as Texas Dolly and Amarillo Slim battled it out at Binion’s Horseshoe Club in downtown Vegas in what was the original World Series of Poker. Those tournaments were as famous for their $10,000 entry fees as they were for the side games that went on in poker rooms around town that often involved a lot more money than the official game.
The tremendous growth of online poker — some studies say several million Americans played for money online at least once a month before the government crackdown — helped fuel the popularity of the tournament, which drew 6,865 entries last year, down from a peak of 8,773 in 2006, when Jamie Gold won what was then a record $12 million.
But the major poker web-sites are now either shut down or shut off in the US. Earlier this week Ray Bitar turned himself in on charges his Full Tilt Poker site operated a Ponzi scheme that stole hundreds of millions of dollars from players.
On the Third of July, it was Esfandiari sitting at the table of eight remaining players, with play broadcast nationally by ESPN. There wasn’t a whole lot of drama, however, as players were dropping like flies and Esfandiari was sweeping up all the chips.
Esfandiari came to the final table leading in chips, and ended up with all the chips by the time it was over.
The One Drop Foundation said the funds from the tournament will finance water projects in countries such as Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, India and Burkina Faso.