25 Days of SHRBowl: From Stocks to High-Stakes

The countdown to the year’s biggest event has begun and over the next 25 days, Poker Central will introduce the entire 2017 Super High Roller Bowl field. From the world’s best high-stakes players, to online crushers and successful businessmen, poker’s most exclusive event has it all. Follow Poker Central’s “25 Days of SHRBowl” to know who will be competing when cards get in the air on May 28^th.

While the non-professional portion of the Super High Roller Bowl field hail from a few different industries, most of the non-pros that will be competing in this month’s event come from financial backgrounds. David Einhorn and Dan Perper fit that billing and while some other non-pros that we’ve featured will be making their first appearance in a $300,000 buy-in event this summer, those kind of stakes are nothing new to Einhorn and Peper both on and off the felt.

A hedge fund manager from New York, David Einhorn nearly turned the poker world on its head in 2012. In the inaugural $1,000,000 buy-in The Big One for One Drop, Einhorn battled one of the toughest fields ever assembled and finished 3^rd, nearly winning the biggest poker tournament of all-time but settling for a $4,325,000 result. Despite the unfathomable buy-in and the massive payout, Einhorn donated all his winnings to City Year, an education-focused organization dedicated to helping students and schools succeed.

That wasn’t the first time Einhorn turned a poker run into a huge charitable donation. Einhorn finished 18^th in the World Series of Poke Main Event, earning $659,000, and that entire score went to The Michael J. Fox Foundation. Einhorn is on that foundation’s board and is also a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, an organization which attempts to alleviate problems cause by poverty in New York City.

Away from the felt and his philanthropic work, Einhorn is one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the United States. Einhorn and Greenlight Capital, which he founded in 1996, have received coverage from Forbes, Fortune Magazine, Bloomberg, CNBC and in 2013, Einhorn was ranked 44^th in the Time 100 most influential list of people in the world.

While Einhorn’s two deep WSOP runs account for much of his poker resume, Dan Perper has had regular success in some of the world’s biggest events. Since 2012, when High Roller events started to gain popularity and when Perper, pictured above, recorded his first $25,000 buy-in cash, the Chicago trader’s results have gotten bigger and bigger.

Perper’s first Super High Roller result came in the spring of 2012, when he notched a podium finish in the first-ever $100,000 Super High Roller at the WPT World Championship. The next year, Perper recorded another six-figure result for a 4^th place finish in the same WPT World Championship Super High Roller, with those two scores earning Perper over $800,000 in combined winnings.

His best career score came two summers ago though, in the $111,111 buy-in High Roller for One Drop. Perper earned $873,000 for a 5^th place finish but maybe more importantly, that run gave Perper reps against plenty of future Super High Roller Bowl players.

Battling at a final table against the likes of Daniel Colman, Ben Sulsky, Phil Hellmuth and Andrew Lichtenberger is basically a crash course in tournament poker. Perper used that experience to nearly record a cash in last year’s Super High Roller Bowl, falling in 15^th place at the hands of eventual runner-up Fedor Holz.

While they may only play a few big buy-in events per year, unlike most of the professionals they will be up against later this month, David Einhorn and Dan Perper have both proven that they can compete at the highest levels of poker. Both will return to the Super High Roller Bowl for the second straight year in 2017, with their eyes on their first career $300,000 buy-in cashes. 

Tomorrow, “25 Days of SHRBowl” continues the non-pro push and features two European businessmen that double as extremely successful poker players. Follow all of Poker Central’s coverage of the year’s biggest event here.