Former Chess Prodigy Getting Attention on EPT

Double-threat Jeff Sarwer (photo courtesy of PokerListings.com)

At eight years’ old, Jeff Sarwer was already a champion chess player. He won the Under 10 World Youth Chess Championships at an age when the rest of us could barely play with our GI Joes. A year later, he was travelling around North America, playing exhibition chess matches against up to forty players at once. He became a media darling, was pegged as a potential future world champion by his peers, and earned a lifetime membership in the Manhattan Chess Club.

And then his dad pulled him out of school, kept him from playing chess, and began living an “alternative lifestyle” that involved living out of their car. The authorities deemed his dad unfit, and took Sarwer away. But he ran away to re-join his dad, and together they dropped out of the public eye for twenty years.

Until Sarwer discovered poker. He bought a seat at last year’s Prague stop on the European Poker Tour, and finished 54th, earning 7,000 Euros. A few months later, in February of this year, he again cashed, coming in third at a European Masters of Poker event in Taillinn.

Then a couple months ago in October, he rode his aggressive play to a 10th place finish at the EPT event in Warsaw. A couple weeks later and he got his first six-figure win, with a third place finish at EPT Vilamoura, good for more than a hundred and fifty thousand Euros.

His string of success didn’t help him, as he busted out early at the EPT Prague event, but he’s certainly proving to be a quick study. He’s steadily improved from his first cash just over a year ago, and seems destined to be someone to watch in the future. Unsurprisingly, he attributes some of his early success to the analytical mind he developed playing his childhood game of choice. But he asserts that most chess players aren’t aggressive enough for poker, a problem he certainly doesn’t have.