What do you do when you're a professional athlete who finds himself in early retirement due to an injury? Well in most cases you retire to the golf links and talk about how every athlete who followed you wasn't in your class. In the case of David Benyamine, when his career as a pro tennis player was cut short he simply rechanneled his competitive juices to less physical sports. Since putting his tennis racquet down for good, David has excelled at a number of other ventures. As a billiards player he has been a consistent winner. His interests did not begin and end at knocking a ball over a net or shoving it into the pockets of a table. Over the years he has proven to be a very competent poker player as well.
Benyamine began playing the game when he was 12. Since then poker had been a regular part of his leisure time. It wasn't until relatively recently though that he began playing it in high stakes games and tournaments. Of his forays into poker, his best days have been when he made the final table at two World Poker Tour tournaments, and when he won the Grand Prix de Paris in 2003. During his poker career David has won a lot of money, but in 2006 he won the respect of one of poker's biggest legends. After David came away from the Big Game as the highest money winning player, when speaking about Benyamine, Doyle Brunson quipped that "Since this boy from France has been here, he's come off a big million-dollar winner. He plays two or three days at a time - like I used to when I was his age."
