2007 World Series of Poker Winner is Finally Here

After much anticipation and suspense the 2007 World Series of Poker finally has a winner. The lucky winner is Jerry Yang, a 39-year-old psychologist/ social worker from California. I bet he is pretty happy right now because the first place prize stood this year at $8.25 million! I sure would not mind switching places with him. Who would not want to become a millionaire almost over night?

What's even more amazing is the fact that Yang is no poker professional, but an average poker player like me. In fact, during an interview held after his win, he said that prior to his incredible win yesterday he had been playing poker for only two years. The 2007 WSOP Champion earned his entry into the Main Event through a satellite in a local casino gaming establishment in California.

In my opinion, the guy is just unbelievably lucky. It is not every day that a relatively new poker player (and I say that he is relatively new because there were other players in the competition who have been playing the game for over twenty years), beats veteran players to a multi-million prize. Besting a field of 6,358 players, who long for the first place prize as badly as you do, is certainly no joke.

Yang, however, probably deserves winning. According to onlinepokereport.com, right after his win, he said that he promised to donate 10% of his winnings to several charitable organizations. That's a worthy decision... I hope he goes through with it.

This somehow reminds me of Jamie Gold, last year's WSOP winner. Gold was a relative poker beginner as well and was lucky enough to win the championship. His first place prize stood at a record amount of $12 million. But, eventually, Gold got only half of the money. This is because he had this legal fight with some other guy named Bruce Crispin Leyser who said that Gold had promised to split his winnings with him. This was in exchange for help in recruiting celebs willing to sport the Bodog.com logo. Gold denied the whole thing. But the court ruled that he must give $6 million to Leyser anyway.

In any case, the WSOP is today's richest poker competition. Players from all over the world flock to Las Vegas in order to try their luck at winning a prestigious WSOP bracelet. By the way, top poker pro Phill Hellmuth is the world leader is WSOP bracelet ownership. He has 11 of them. Right behind him are Doyle Brunson and Johny Chan with 10 gold bracelets each.