Poker Player to Give WSOP Winnings to Charity
May 4th, 2010
If you did happen to win all this, could you hand it over to charity? (photo courtesy of WSOP)
Many top professional poker players are well known for giving generously to charitable causes. But one amateur player is getting in on the act too, with a plan to donate the entirety of his winnings from the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event to charity. He’s a New York City entrepreneur named Michael Karnjanaprakorn, and he cooked up the idea while chatting to poker pro Rafe Furst at last year’s WSOP.
The idea is to both try to raise money for a good cause or two, and to raise the profile of poker players who give to help out those less fortunate. So Karnjanaprakorn teamed up with Furst to launch the World Series of Good. The first step is to raise enough money for the $10,000 Main Event buy-in. He’s using the web-based fund-raising site KickStarter to help with that. Assuming he’s successful with step one, he’ll sit down with one of poker’s biggest philanthropists, Annie Duke, for some intensive coaching to help prepare for the tournament. Contributors to his KickStarter fund will also have a chance to sit in on the lessons.
Once he’s all bought in and coached up, it’s all up to Michael. If he does cash at the WSOP, he’ll donate 100% of his winnings to a pair of charities. The Langston Hughes Academy is a charter school in New Orleans that was started after Hurricane Katrina, and recently lost a great deal of cash to an embezzlement scheme. The second charity is one that might be familiar to poker fans. Bad Beat on Cancer was formed by Furst and Phil Gordon in 2003 to help raise funds for cancer research. So far, poker players have donated more than $2 million to Bad Beat, mostly through giving up some of their proceeds from tournament winnings. And if Karnjanaprakorn can pull off a miracle at the 2010 WSOP, that number could get a whole lot bigger.
