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The Man Behind the Largest Buy-In Poker Tournament in History - Guy Laliberté

It probably takes an accordion-playing, fire-eating, stilt-walking, space-exploring philanthropist to come up with such a wild poker tournament idea in the service of a humanitarian cause. And Canadian @Guy Laliberté is exactly that. Plus successful entrepreneur and billionaire and a poker player with an impressive record on the felt: $2,582,286 in live earnings since 2006.

 

Guy was born in 1959 in Canada and was part of the world of street performance in his youth. In 1984, together with his friend and colleague, Gilles Ste-Croix, he won a Canadian government grant for a one-year project that would eventually expand and become a worldwide institution, setting new standards and reinventing the frontiers in modern circus entertainment - Cirque du Soleil.

Photo: AFP/GETTY The total worldwide audience of Cirque du Soleil shows is some 90 million people.

2007 was an important year in Guy's biography, with both his poker career and philanthropic activity moving up to a different level. He founded One Drop - a charity organization dedicated to making water "accessible to all, today and forever". And finished fourth in the World Poker Tour Season Five Main Event, winning $696,220. That same year Guy Laliberté was on High Stakes Poker, Season 4, with the likes of @Patrik Antonius (FI) , @Doyle Brunson, @Jennifer Harman, and @Daniel Negreanu

He later took part in Poker After Dark, Season 4. Watch him bluff @Phil Hellmuth with 10 high vs Hellmuth's JJ:

To celebrate his 50th anniversary, in 2009 Guy treated himself to a 32 million-dollar present and became the first Canadian space tourist (7th worldwide). He embarked on what he called a 'poetic social mission' taking thousands of photographs from the International Space Station that he would later share in his GAIA project:


ONE DROP Poetic Social Mission by multivu

 

"GAIA—a creative project designed by Guy Laliberté for ONE DROP—is a body of work bearing witness to the beauty and fragility of Earth with regard to the universe. All proceeds from GAIA sales go to ONE DROP. ONE DROP is an initiative of Guy Laliberté, Founder of Cirque du Soleil™. Its aim is to provide everyone with access to safe water, now and forever."

So where could he go after space exploration?.. In 2012 Guy Laliberté joined forces with Ceasar's Entertainment (owners of WSOP) to organize a unique event - a $1 million buy-in NLTHE tournament with a noble charity cause as additional incentive. The event sold out, with 48 entries, and the first prize soared to the unimaginable $18,346,673, won by Antonio Esfandiari who climbed to the top of the live earnings ranking. Guy himself had been the first to register and one of the last ones to drop out - he finished in the fifth place, with $1,834,666

An extra table has been included this year and the cap has been raised to 56 players. Three months from the #OneDrop event, already there have been 23 confirmations and it looks like the $ 5.3 million raised for One Drop Foundation will be exceeded in 2014. (There is no rake and instead, $111,111 of every buy-in goes to One Drop Foundation.)

The bold concept of staging this unprecedented buy-in event in the service of a humanitarian cause could perhaps only have come from a visionary such as Guy Laliberté. But no less important was his own passion for the game of poker. To quote @Bertrand Grospellier, "Guy was so important. If it wasn't for Guy, there wouldn't have been a tournament. It had to be him, a guy who loved poker, knew the players and knew the businessmen. Guy was definitely the absolute best person to do this."

Such a great destiny....or a perfect long term strategy  

The Globe and Mail reports that Guy Laliberté is about to close the deal to sell his controlling interest in the Cirque du Soleil.

US private equity giant TPG Capital is part of the deal, and the price is reportedly less than the expected $2 billion. 

http://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-ottawaquebec-edition/20150416/281865822001427/TextView


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