Boxing champion to turn to poker

After retiring from poker, heavyweight champion David Haye wants to become a poker champion, despite not knowing the rules.

David Haye retired from boxing more than a year ago. He now wants to win a major poker tournament, which seems to be a long way to go considering he admittedly knows nothing about the game.

However, David has already found a number of pros to coach him. Joe Beevers, Katie Swift, and Jeff Kimber are all professionals from the UK with combined tournament earnings of more than $4.5 million. Haye is looking for a 12-month training, where he'll get coaching from actors, psychologists, and mathematicians in order to "forge his own style."

His goal is to enter and win the 2019 Goliath poker tournament at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry - an ambitious goal indeed.

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“I come from the boxing realm and will be going into the poker realm. It’s about accepting the fact that I’ll be pretty poor, that every single person I’m playing with is better than I am.

In sport, if you’re sometimes bigger and stronger than other people, that’s enough to get you by. But I can’t use my physicality to fast track me. It’s not about how quick I am or my reflexes. It’s about learning the bread and butter of poker correctly from the very beginning.

My biggest challenge is facing that, opening my arms and saying ‘help me, give me as much knowledge as you can’. I can’t rush. Right now I don’t know the rules of poker and that means I can learn the foundations from the best and move forward quickly. I’m such a novice so I have to focus on the fundamentals. I don’t want to embarrass myself in a year’s time. That’s not why I’m here. I want to sit down with confidence and will enter the tournament to win.” David told Talk Sport.

While to goal seems to be extremely ambitious, David has already overcome odds before in his boxing career and with a humble and hard-working approach, he has a good chance to surprise even the sharpest pros.