Rafael Nadal showed he may have a career at the card table when he retires from international tennis after winning a charity poker tournament in Prague on yesterday.
The 100 000-euro ($137 000) charity tournament was the first-ever live poker event for the Spaniard, who this year stripped Serbia’s Novak Djokovic of the world’s top spot in tennis.
Nadal continued that habit of dethroning world No 1 players when he saw off Daniel Negreanu the world number one poker player. Apart from beating Negreanu, Nadal beat Italian downhill skiing star Alberto Tomba, past football legends Ronaldo and Andriy Shevchenko, and also in the final Dutch field hockey champion Fatima Moreira de Melo.
Nadal became a fervent poker player following the knee injury that sidelined him from Tennis last year, but previous to this had only ever played in online poker tournaments.
