Hockey coach scores $233,852 Full Tilt jackpot

(PRESS RELEASE) -- A Canadian hockey coach this week won a $233,852 jackpot on his phone at online poker site Full Tilt, but didn’t realize how much he’d won because he was watching the Toronto Blue Jays trying to break their 23-year playoff drought.

‘I was just watching baseball, the Blue Jays against the Atlanta Braves, and had my phone going. At first I thought I won $116, and thought it was kind of cool, then I realised it was the jackpot and got an email from Full Tilt,’ said the player from Ontario who plays under the name ‘dbecks23ex’.

The part-time hockey coach, a restaurateur by trade, initially thought he’d enjoyed a nice, albeit smaller win, before the reality set: he’d won the first ever progressive jackpot of The Deal, the jewel in the crown of Full Tilt’s Players Club.

The Full Tilt jackpot is split fifty-fifty between the jackpot winner, who collected $116,935, and all other players who have played The Deal in the previous 24 hours: 7,321 players got a surprise $15.97 deposited into their account.

Not quite believing that he’d won his share, the father of two kept watching the game before daring to believe that he’d won more than double the annual average Canadian salary playing on the Full Tilt app.

‘I called my Dad and some friends – and told them I think I just won a jackpot on Full Tilt,’ he said. ‘I was like holy smokes! Anything competitive, I like. Whether it is horse shoes or hockey or playing cards with friends, I get a kick out of competition.’

The Blue Jays, who are currently leading their division, went on to lose the game 3-2, but are still looking good to break a 23-year playoff drought, a record for any North American professional sports team. Winning the World Series would be an entirely different kind of jackpot.