Matthew Stevens & Poker.

October 2006

Poker is a famous game that is present among the hobbies of the celebrities, the rich and famous. And among them are well-known for every snooker fan names of Stephen Hendry, Mark Williams, Jimmy White, Steve Davis and Matthew Stevens. Many of the snooker players take a great interest to poker, to while away the time between the matches, but the names of the above mentioned snooker champions can be found regularly among those ones who take part in professional poker tournaments.

Though Matthew Stevens doesn't have the results in snooker equal to the wins of his elder friends, he surpassed them on the poker table. The poker professionals have their own rankings based on the sums of the prizes. The 29-years-old Welshman Stevens is the only snooker player who entered the top-100 list of British poker players, taking the prestigious 20th place with his winnings $ 525,315.

His poker Fortune smiled to Matthew in 2004: in July he is the 3rd in the Celebrity Poker Club Series 2 in Cardiff - he turned to be luckier on the poker table than on the snooker one at homeland of Wales. And in November of 2004 Matthew Stevens gets his triumph in the Pacific Poker UK Open in Maidstone by winning the UK's richest poker tournament. He beat tennis star Yevgeny Kafelnikov and darts champion Phil Taylor in the televised final.

Before he left Matthew Stevens said: "This is absolutely unbelievable and I am in a complete daze... It's a dream to win a poker tournament having only been playing for a short time... I was quietly confident going into the final but if at the start of the tournament you'd have told me I'd be winning it, I'd have thought you were barmy".

His agent Brendan Parker said due to the current exchange rate between the pound and the dollar Stevens was away this week in New York: "It's somewhere he had always wanted to go so he is away on a week's holiday spending some of his winnings", - he explained.

World darts champion Phil Taylor finished second and Yevgeny Kafelnikov, who has announced his retirement from tennis to concentrate on professional poker, came third. Taylor said: "I couldn't have been beaten by a better person than Matthew. This tournament has been one of the highlights of my life".

In 2005 just as soon as the snooker season is over, on the 10th of May, Matthew Stevens takes the 3rd place in the Poker Million - The Masters tournament, and in November of this year he again performs very well in the 888.com Pacific Poker Open taking the 4th place. This tournament is sponsored by the 888.com, one of the biggest Internet-casino, that is also now the main sponsor of the Snooker World Championship. It looks like snooker and poker are great friends.

The end of May 2006 was marked by the2nd place in the Western Summer Festival poker tournament held London, with $ 11 275 as the prize.

And from from Mid-October to Mid-November 2006 Matthew is going again to play Poker in the 888.com UK Poker Open, together with his fellow snooker players John Higgins and Graeme Dott. It really looks like being good at snooker should give an advantage when it comes to poker. As in snooker, the players need to know when to hold back and when to take a calculated risk.

POKER PROFILE
(based on TheHendonMob data)

Matthew Stevens takes the 20th place in the British top-100 of professional poker players.

POKER STATS

IN COMPARISON TO OTHER SNOOKER PLAYERS