Poker has become one of the most played card games in the world and has seen a high number of celebrities taking to both the live and the virtual tables in their bid for excitement and profit.

The latest to have fallen for the love of the game is seven times Wimbledon tennis champion Pete Sampras.

The tennis professional managed to raise his earnings while playing on the tennis courts, acquiring a huge $43 million during his time as a tennis professional. This amount of money would have set anyone up for life, but Sampras is looking to add a little more excitement into his spare time.

The tennis star revealed his love for the game while attending a VIP dinner that was hosted at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, California.

According to San Jose news sources, the ex professional tennis star has already been playing poker in a tournament stage, saying that they can reveal that the player has been entering poker tournaments that present a buy in fee of $30,000.

It seems that sports stars are continuing to look to poker to fill their time after retiring from the sports that they earned their livings playing, with the likes of football’s Teddy Sheringham and cricket’s Shane Warne making the move over to the popular game.

Sampras isn’t the first tennis star to try to make a living playing poker either, Boris Becker and Yevgeniy Kafelnikov saw to that, taking up the game a number of years back.

The poker playing sporting stars are still to make big news within the poker community but with more and more players looking to hit the poker felts, surely it has to be only a matter of time until we see them flooding the major live poker tournaments?

It seems that the growth of poker is calling to even the people who aren’t looking to make quick money too.

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Tags: Boris Becker, Pete Sampras, Teddy Sheringham, Yevgeniy Kafelnikov

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 8:20 am and is filed under Poker Player News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.