The buy-in to play poker with Pete Sampras is $30,000.
When Pete Sampras played tennis professionally, there was nobody in the world who could touch him; the Hall of Famer won 14 Grand Slam titles and earned more than $43 million on the courts during his career. Now, perhaps seeking out the thrill of competition that he left behind when he retired from the sport, he's taken to putting a little of that money on the table in poker games.
The seven-time Wimbledon champ shared his fondness for poker during a VIP dinner last night at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, Calif., where he later played an exhibition tennis match against the world's current #11 player, Fernando Verdasco. According to the San Jose Mercury News, the poker games Sampras has been playing have a $30,000 buy-in, and the champ says most of his opponents in these high-stakes showdowns have "more money than sense." Still, that doesn't mean he's quite the sure thing on the felt that he was on the court just yet; Sampras joked with the crowd in San Jose that he had to play the exhibition match with Verdasco because he's stuck for the year playing poker.
Sampras is far from the first aging athletic champion to take up poker as a replacement for the sport he can no longer play competitively. Former England soccer star Teddy Sheringham, ex-Australian cricket captain Shane Warne, and Sampras' fellow former tennis pros Boris Becker and Yevgeniy Kafelnikov are all regularly spotted at international high-stakes tournaments. It's doubtful Sampras has any plans to join them any time soon, but if anyone ever plans a charity poker tournament with ex-athletes they could probably do worse than giving old Pete a call.
