Millionaire WPT Prime Champion Rutger Hennen Jailed for Six Months
Rutger Hennen's life took a dramatic turn earlier this month. The Dutchman was recently ranked 30th in Quote magazine's Top 100 Young Self-Made Millionaires and had become a World Poker Tour champion after taking down the WPT Prime Amsterdam Main Event for €209,775, and had started traveling far and wide playing poker. Any dreams of world poker domination are currently paused because Hennen finds himself behind bars in a Netherlands jail after a 2019 crash that killed a teenage cyclist.
In 2017, Hennen rented a van and sold stand-up chairs and custom recliners to the elderly. The business flourished and enjoyed average profits of €6.4 million over three years. Vendis Capital, a European private equity fund, added Hennen's company, Meubelzorg, to its vast portfolio in June 2023, sending Hennen's net worth skyward to €50 million.
Hennen had a handful of live poker tournament cashes on his Hendon Mob profile between 2011 and 2019, but began hitting the table more regularly following his windfall. He won the €1,100 WPT Amsterdam Main Event in March 2024 for €209,775, traveled to Ireland for the Irish Poker Open, and more recently finished 31st in the €5,300 PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) Monte-Carlo Main Event. That trip to Monaco will be Hennen's last for at least six months.
A Fateful Night in June 2019
June 19, 2019, almost five years before Hennen became a WPT champion, he drove his Porsche Cayenne at high speed through an intersection, hitting a 15-year-old girl who was crossing that section of road with her bicycle. The teenager died instantly.
A court found Hennen guilty of the girl's death and imposed a five-month prison sentence and an 18-month driving ban. However, the Public Prosecution Service appealed against the original sentence, claiming Hennen was using his mobile phone prior to the collision. Hennen also appealed, asking for community service in lieu of jail time, but the court increased his sentence to six months, plus a two-year driving ban.
Hennen appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but the judges were unrelenting. They ordered him to serve a six-month jail sentence and surrender his driving license for two years.
According to sources close to Quote magazine, Hennen reported to prison earlier this month.
Other Poker Players Guilty of Flouting the Law
Unfortunately, Hennen is not the first poker player to find themselves swapping the poker tables for a spell behind bars.
Darren Woods, a former 888poker-sponsored pro, who won a $2,000 No-Limit Hold'em Six-Handed event at the 2011 World Series of Poker (WSOP), was jailed for 15 months in January 2015 after a court found him guilty of several frauds against online poker rooms and online payment processors. British authorities confiscated £911,217 from Woods and gave him a six-month deadline to pay an additional £283,673 to an unnamed Gibraltar-based company. Prosecutors believed Woods' activities earned him much larger profits.
In 2015, Christian Lusardi was ordered to spend five years behind bars after he counterfeited tournament chips used during the Borgata Winter Poker Open. Lusardi was caught flushing 494 fake T5,000 and nine fake T25,000 chips down the toilet of his hotel room. Lusardi was released on parole after almost eight months in prison.
More recently, in July 2021, news broke of a high-stakes poker player being arrested in Ibiza after the private jet they were traveling on was found to contain more than 1.5 kilos of narcotics and more than $10,000 in various currencies. The perpetrator was widely reported as being Salman Behbehani, who fit the newspaper report's description of the arrested man.
Although there has been no news about the case or whether Behbehani was involved, the poker pro has not cashed in a live event since August 2018 despite averaging seven scores per year over the past ten years.
