Seat 1: Olivier Busquet, 30, Westchester County, USA – 3,011,000
Widely regarded as one of the best heads-up sit-n-go players in the world, Olivier Busquet has made a highly successful move to live poker and has already earned over $2.5 million. He first started playing poker in home games while working for a Wall Street trading firm. He said: “When I first took up poker, it was with the idea that there was essentially a lot of skill set overlap between what a Wall Street trader and a poker professional were doing. Another friend of mine told me about online poker and I got right into it. Eventually, I had built up to a few thousand dollars and jumped into $5-$10. In the span of a month, I had earned about $100,000 and moved into the $25-$50 games.”
On one site, Busquet became the first ever player to win seven-figures playing heads-up SNGs and in 2009 he started playing live. He cashed several times at that summer’s World Series but it was his victory at WPT Borgata in September that put him on the map when he beat a 1,108-strong field for $925,514. A few months later, Busquet snagged the second biggest cash of his career - €597,000 after finishing second to Tobias Reinkemeier at the EPT6 Grand Final High Roller in Monaco. Since then he has cashed at the PCA, EPT Deauville and NAPT Mohegan Sun as well as finishing fourth in the EPT London High Roller event last October for £171,200 and 34th at EPT Madrid two weeks ago.