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Sarah Bilney
Sarah Bilney
Sarah Bilney Places in the 2005 WSOP!
July 10th, 2005Sarah Bilney placed 68th place in Event #45: No Limit Hold'em $1,000.00 Buy in. There were 758 Entries into this event, with a total prize pool of $697,360. She beat almost 700 players, earning a prize of $1,185.00. Congratulations, Sarah Bilney! Sarah, Queen of Las Vegas
July 21, 2005It's a landmark moment in the life of any public figure when the media calls and it turns out they want to speak to your daughter.
And so it was this week as Diary rang Gordon Bilney, former federal MP and minister for Pacific Island affairs in the last ALP government, to get in touch with his offspring Sarah, who has displayed a new aspect of the family's talents by finishing 63rd in last weekend's World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. While Joseph "Hash" Hachem, scooped the $10 million first-prize purse, Bilney jnr produced a personal best, winning an impressive $200,000 and finishing both the second-highest-ranked woman and the second-highest-ranked Australian. The link between poker and politics is well established. Presidents Warren Harding and Harry S. Truman were notorious players, as was Tricky Dicky Nixon. Still, Bilney says she didn't get her poker face from Dad. "Ever since I was a kid we'd go on holidays and play cards around the dinner table," she says down the phone from London. "We'd always play classic Australian games like 500, not poker." Instead, her fiance Michael, a dedicated poker buff who used to play for a living, got her hooked five years ago. Now she plays regularly and slotted the Las Vegas tournament in between exams and completing her masters thesis in international relations at the London School of Economics. Bilney made it through to the end of day four of the seven-day competition clocking up between 13 and 15 hours at the tables on the toughest days. The game was No Limit Texas Hold'em, where you can lose everything in one hand. You need nerves of steel, an ability to bluff, a good dose of luck, and a sense of the maths of the game, she says. "One of the things I've been studying in my degree is game theory (which tries to predict how people will interact given particular pay-offs or punishments) and there's probably a link there to how I play, but poker is a game, you're sitting around with the other players, it's unique." Dad, a diplomat for 16 years before his political career, was also unique, if not always perfectly poker-faced. Shortly after losing his seat in the 1996 landslide to the Coalition, he wrote to a complaining local official: "One of the great pleasures of private life is that I need no longer to be polite to nincompoops, bigots, curmudgeons and twerps who infest local government bodies and committees such as yours." No bluffing there, then.
Sarah Bilney Alternate Spelling:
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