PokerWorks

Starting Day 7, 3rd in chips with a stack nearing the seven million mark, NY hedge fund manager David Einhorn is emerging as one of the greatest stories of this year's World Series. Einhorn, a co-founder and president of Greenlight Capital, Inc. has pledged all of his winnings in this year's World Series Main Event to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. Einhorn serves on the Board of Directors of the Fox Foundation, as well as the board of the New Century Financial Corporation, the Leadership Council of the Robin Hood Foundation and several other boards and service organizations.

A relative unknown in the tournament poker world, Einhorn has matched poker wits with some of the top players in the world before, making the final table at a charity tournament earlier this year featuring Dan Harrington, T.J. Cloutier and Clonie Gowen. That charity tournament featured a field that should certainly have included some of New York's best poker mathematicians, as it was a fundraiser for Math for America which raised almost $2 million for that charity. For his second final table finish at that tourney in two years, Einhorn received a silver trophy cup. His prize this week is significantly larger financially, and his deserved rewards are far greater for his plans for his WSOP cash.

Einhorn is just the latest in a plethora of charitable contributions that we've seen at this year's WSOP, starting with Phil Hellmuth's $25,000 kickoff pledge to Phil Gordon's Bad Beat on Cancer charity, and followed quickly by Mike Sexton's donation of 50% of his Tournament of Champions winnings to five different charities. That amounted to $100,000 each to the five charities Sexton was playing for. Sexton, Hellmuth, and Einhorn join Barry Greenstein, who is widely noted for his contribution of 100% of his tournament winnings to charities and WPT Player of the Year Gavin Smith, who has spent a large portion of his non-table time at the WSOP raising money and awareness for www.forpeyton.com, as the forerunners of a new breed of Poker Robin Hoods.