Hairabedian is French Player of the Year 2010
Hairabedian wins again
After cashing at over 20 tournaments over the past year, Roger Hairabedian has been awarded the title of French poker player of the year for the second time running.
Even though Live Poker has restructured the way in which they award points for their French player of the year promotion, Roger Hairabedian has still managed to win the title for the second year in a row.
His largest competition came in the form of Corsican, Jean Paul Pasqualini who almost won the title, but in the end he was unable to match the 1572 points which Hairabedian had managed to collect over the year.
Hairabedian’s impressive list of achievements over 2010 include 20 tournament cashes totaling $590,288 in winnings, most of which came from final tables and one of which was a victory at the Mazagan Poker Millions No. 10 last month.
Hairabedian, who has come to be known by the nickname ‘Terminator’, was born in Marseille in 1955. Outside of poker he used to have a great passion for judo and was a member of the French judo team for 7 years between 1975 and 1982. In 1981 he was the European Judo Champion.
Unfortunately his career was brought to an end by a knee injury, but this ultimately lead him to taking up the game of poker in 1985 at the age of 30. It was not long before Hairabedian was seeing considerable success as a professional player. After the start of the poker boom, Hairabedian changed from playing draw poker to NL tournaments and in 1999 he cashed in his first event.
Since this first event Hairabedian has managed to cash in 59 tournaments and earned over $1,800,000 in his career. His largest ever win was in 2008 at the €10,000 Grand Prix De Paris where he won $653,163. Despite his age Hairabedian consistently beats off the younger breed of poker players, and many say his talent is truly revealed by his consistent wins.
Whilst Hairabedian is considered to be an ambassador of poker in France, he is not currently being sponsored by any online poker sites. However, this could be because he is closely linked to the Moroccan casino Es Saadi. Unusually for a modern day player, Hairabedian refuses to player poker online and will only take part in live tournaments.
It will certainly be exciting and worthwhile watching this man over the coming year to see if he can pull off a hat trick and take the title for the third year in a row.
