Inside Warren Buffett's Private Poker Game

Found via the Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax.

Warren Buffett is a famously world-class bridge player, putting in 12 hours a week at the table, often with Bill Gates, and sponsoring the Buffett Cup, which mimics golf’s Ryder Cup, except with cards. “Every hand fascinates me,” he recently told me, in explaining this obsession. But relatively quietly, over the past seven years he’s emerged as the host of one of the planet’s most exclusive poker games.

While the World Series of Poker Main Event remains the most famous and prestigious tournament, a ten-day-long bacchanal that satisfies ESPN’s late-night programming needs for months, it’s also open to anyone with $10,000 and a dream. The NetJets Poker Invitational, run by Berkshire Hathaway‘s private-jet subsidiary, has a much steeper hurdle: Players must be a NetJets fractional owner (minimum cost: $200,000), with a select few heavy Marquis Jet Card owners sprinkled in.

However enticing the $500,000 prize pool–the big winner has the option of ten hours of time on a Bombardier Global 5000, worth $150,000, and the top ten all get something heady–the true stakes are measured in ego. As at the World Series of Poker, Texas Hold ‘Em is nothing more than a betting and bluffing game, and tournaments like this appeal to the same primal instincts as in an ancient battle royale, combated via brains and daring. Because the player pool is exclusively comprised of people successful for reasons other than cards, bragging rights feel as tangible as a Main Event winner’s bracelet. Plus Buffett lords over all of it, as host, mascot and, most notably, target. Knocking the Oracle of Omaha out of the tournament is the poker equivalent of beating Jack Nicklaus at a charity closest-to-the-hole contest.