LAS VEGAS -- The tactics may be cut throat but the results can be downright sweet.
An increasing number of poker players are donating portions of their winnings to good causes. Six days into this year's World Series of Poker main event, bluffing, stealing and sandbagging already have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity.
Players say it doesn't mean they're going soft.
"It doesn't seem to matter, that killer instinct comes out," Jason Alexander, the "Seinfeld" actor and a regular gambler for good said Wednesday as he sat down with 1,300 others for a second round of no-limit Texas Hold 'em. "You play the way you play, you just feel worse when you lose."
Celebrities seem to be driving the trend. This year's main event opened with an "Ante Up for Africa" tournament, whose list of players read like movie credits. Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Ray Romano played. The event raised more than $500,000 for the International Rescue Committee and The Enough Project to help refugees in Darfur.
Less famous players also are passing along their good luck. Poker pro David Einhorn donated all of his 2006 main event winnings, $660,000, to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Disease.
Einhorn, who finished 18th in 2006, said his game isn't changed by its benevolent underpinnings.
"I'm just trying to play my cards and my opponents and hope for the best," he said, shortly before busting out of this year's tournament, which pays about $59.8 million to players who finish in the money, including $8.25 million to the winner.
Poker pro and author Barry Greenstein said he plays a "more focused" game when he has charity riding on it.
Greenstein started giving away his winnings in 2003 with a promise to donate every chip of a $1.3 million tournament to Children Incorporated, a group that provides school supplies and food for children.
"When I won, my dad looked at me and said, 'You're not really giving all this away are you?'" Greenstein said. "I said, 'You know, my word is good.' I didn't know I was going to win!"
Greenstein, 52, kept up the giving for a few years, until he couldn't pay his expenses, he said. Now he gives to charities at the end of the year.
That's taken some of the pressure off.
He said he used to think of the children he was helping as he played his hand. He'd nurse a nest of chips for hours, rather than give up and bust.
"If it was my own money, I would have thrown it in," he said.
Alexander, too, said he felt the pressure of playing for someone else.
"You start to go, 'I'm going to lose these people a half a million dollars,"' he said, of a realization he had at a Celebrity Poker Showdown benefiting Hurricane Katrina victims. "I won that one, thank God."
Of course, most of the seats at the Rio hotel-casino tournament floor are filled with dreamers still thinking of winning enough to have the luxury to give away money.
By Friday the field will be whittled down to a group of 621 players who will double their $10,000 buy-in.
"Hopefully, I'll be able to do that -- hopefully," said former champ Chris "Jesus" Ferguson.
Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press
