Hachem wins WPT

Joe Hachem joined an exclusive club when he won the WPT Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship in Las Vegas on Wednesday 20 December, 2007.

Hachem, from Sydney, Australia, became one of only four players to win both a World Poker Tour title (WPT) and the World Series of Poker (WSOP) main event. Victory in the $15,000 buy-in WPT event, with 576 contestants, earned Hachem over $2.1m.

Added to his $7.5m first prize at the 2005 WSOP, the win took Hachem’s earnings to over $10m in less than two years.

Winning the WPT event cemented Hachem’s reputation as an outstanding poker player, and put to bed any suggestions that his 2005 WSOP victory was a flash in the pan.

“I’m floating, I can’t even feel the ground,” Hachem told Card Player magazine after his win. “When I won the World Series I wasn’t this excited. And a lot of it has to do with validation.” “How cool do you reckon it is to belong to a club that only has four members?”

The club of poker legends includes:

* 1976 & 1977 WSOP winner Doyle Brunson won the Legends of Poker WPT event in 2004

* 1998 WSOP winner Scotty Nguyen won the Gold Strike World Poker Open in 2006.

* 2001 WSOP winner Carlos Mortensen won the Doyle Brunson North American Championship WPT event in 2004

* 2005 WSOP winner Joe Hachem won the Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship WPT event in 2006

Joe Hachem will be joining other members of Team PokerStars at the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo, March 28 – April 1, 2007. This event, Europe’s richest poker tournament, has a guaranteed first prize of one million euros.