A True Cinderella Story: Farid Yachou Overcomes Tough Field and More To Win WPT TOC

On Sunday, Farid Yachou won the inaugural World Poker Tour Tournament of Champions, topping a field of 64 players to win $381,600, a 2016 Corvette, courtesy of Monster, and a plethora of other prizes. Yachou’s win closed out another season on the WPT and helped complete one of the best Cinderella stories that we’ve seen in poker.

“It’s something I cannot believe,” Yachou said after his victory. “I was seated with only champions, and I said to myself, ‘I will be glad when I’m finishing in 30th, something like that. You know, leaving behind 20-25 champions. Then slowly, day by day, hand by hand, it all came together and everything came to me, so what can I say?”

One year ago, very little in poker knew of Yachou, except for a couple guys he played with in home games around Leeuwarden, Netherlands. There was Pieter de Korver, winner of the 2009 European Poker Tour Grand Final, and also Remko Rinkema, who said he played with Yachou a bit when he first got into poker in 2006.

“I don’t have any specific memories of playing with Farid back in 2006, but I do recall him always being there as one of the guys,” Rinkema said of Yachou. “We played low-limit rebuy tournaments and €1/€2 cash games, which was a lot of money for me back then. The live poker scene in Leeuwarden was very lively back in those days, and there was a game almost daily somewhere in the city.”

It was de Korver who originally got Yachou into tournament poker, and it all started with a bang at WPT Amsterdam at the beginning of Season 14. Prior to that tournament, Yachou had never played a major live event. He played regularly in poker games with friends, and when he found out de Korver was headed to Amsterdam to play in the WPT event, Yachou decided to tag along.

“I had a friend of mine, and I was always playing with him,” said Yachou when asked about how he came to play the WPT Amsterdam event despite never playing a big poker tournament before. “He was not that much better than me or maybe equal, and he won an EPT tournament for at that time more than €2 million. It was a good friend of mine, Pieter de Korver. He’s a friend of mine, he lives in my city. So when WPT Amsterdam came, he told me about it and that he was going to play it. And I said, ‘Well if you are going to play, then I am going to play, too.’ I used to always see the people on television playing poker, and every time I would see them I would think, ‘I can do that also.’ And I tried, and I got lucky. I got lucky, and I played the tournament very well. Each hand I thought about it and I played it calm, [not too aggressive], like I did this tournament.”

Yachou celebrates after the final hand in Amsterdam

Not only was de Korver the person responsible for getting Yachou involved in live tournament poker, but his name came up when talking to Yachou about his fear of flying. When Yachou won WPT Amsterdam and he was told that part of his prize included an entry into the WPT Tournament of Champions, and that the Tournament of Champions was in America, he didn’t want to go because he is scared to fly for travel.

“Yes, that is true,” Yachou said when asked if he was scared about flying. “First I asked them if Pieter de Korver could go in my name, and they said no because it’s only for WPT champions. So I thought that if it’s like that, then I would go myself. Everything was a little bit far and I didn’t have the visa. I had only two days to get the visa, but it came. When I was on the plane from Madrid to Florida, I felt calm and I wasn’t afraid. It was a very good flight, so everything came together well. I didn’t sleep very much.”

The visa situation was also an interesting one, and one that could’ve prevented Yachou from being able to make the trip for the WPT Tournament of Champions. As it turned out, his visa was signed on the last possible day, narrowly getting it in before the approval deadline passed. Another 24 hours and Yachou wouldn’t have been able to make the trip.

On top of that, Yachou had never been to America, adding to the awe of this remarkable story and making his win even more impressive. Anyone who has a reluctancy to travel due to the uneasiness of it all understands that being somewhere new and not knowing …

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