Home / Poker News August 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – Jens Kyllonen to Go Into Space
The Poker Grapevine – Jens Kyllonen to Go Into Space
Posted by: Randy Williams - Tue, 2012-08-28 12:15
Most online poker pros are true fanatics, like Viktor Blom and Ilari Sahamies, who love the game so much they find it extremely difficult to get away from it even for short spans of time. Such players usually re-invest all their winnings, moving to ever higher stakes and breaking new records as they win more and more. Others, while successful at the online poker tables, have other aspirations too. Jens Kyllonen, who is among the biggest cash game winners at PokerStars’ nosebleed stakes tables in 2012, is fascinated by spaceflight. Kyllonen, who is currently up $1.6 million for the year, has decided to invest some of his winnings into fulfilling one of his childhood dreams: heading into space. Kyllonen has paid about €160k to reserve a seat on Virgin Galactic’ s spaceflight which is set to take place in 2014. Kyllonen isn’t the first poker player to have reserved a space-faring seat: Guy Laliberte, poker player and billionaire entrepreneur, has also made a similar move a while ago. The flight will last two hours and those taking part in it will be required to undergo several days of training beforehand.
Kyllonen has long been known as someone who wouldn’t refrain from spending large amounts of money on something he liked and wanted to do. He was among the first to buy into the $1 million Big One for One Drop event of the
2012 WSOP. He wasn’t particularly lucky there: he was the third player to bite the dust in the event, at the hands of Frederic Banjout, a French businessman.
In other news: the Guinness World Record for the Longest Continuous
Poker Tournament was broken the other day in a Delaware poker room, where players battled on for 36 hours, 34 minutes and 41 seconds in something called the ‘Iron Man Challenge’. The action in the challenge kicked off on Sunday afternoon and it went on without a break until it completed its objective.
