Praise is certainly due for the recent UKSPC tournament winner, twenty one year old Ben Foxwell form Kingswood. The UK Student Poker Championships are a great place to spot the pro players of tomorrow, as well as a fantastic opportunity for students to find a way out of debt and to make life more comfortable for themselves while studying – and the Sports and Exercise student from Cardiff Metropolitan University made it to the top this time out.
The UKSPC takes place in UK casinos every year, with the 2013 venue having been at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry. Foxwell beat four hundred and sixty eight other entrants to the prize, which is a very nice £3,450 in cash as well as entry to the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour grand final which is worth £2,000 – not bad when you consider that his entry price was just £30. He said that he has been playing for a few years, and started out practicing with friends before moving on to the internet. “I’ve had a couple of $1,000 wins online,” he said. “But nothing as big as this.”
He is not really considering poker as a future career choice, but instead sees it as a fun and lucrative hobby that will accompany his career in cardiology and sport science. “I was pretty confident as the structure was very slow, but knew there would be some great players there,” he explained. “I thought I may be in with a chance early evening on the second day, when I became chip leader for the first time, although shortly after lost a couple of pots.”
This is not the only way that he has been trying to supplement his student loan – he is one of the students who chooses to work part time in order to fund their course. “I also work in Tesco,” he explained after his big win. “So it’s nice to have some extra money.” That is certainly something that any student in the UK could relate to at the moment, with course fees higher than ever thanks to the changes brought in by the government!
