UFC on FOX 11's Jorge Masvidal in poker tourney finals, playing for six-figure prize

Jorge Masvidal stands to make a pretty hefty April bonus on Saturday if his cards land right.

Masvidal (25-8 MMA, 2-1 UFC), who fights Pat Healy (31-17 MMA, 0-3 UFC) later this month at UFC on FOX 11, is vying for another type of performance bonus on Saturday when he competes in the finals of a World Poker Tour event with $500,000 in payouts.

“First place would be, like, $200,000 or $180,000, something like that,” Masvidal told MMAjunkie.

The tournament, a “Deep Stack No-Limit Hold’em” competition, takes place at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Masvidal said he shied away from the televised tournament on April 16 with a buy-in of $3,500.

And, lest he forget, he’s got a fight on April 19 at Orlando, Fla.’s Amway Center. The veteran lightweights square off on the FOX Sports 1-televised prelims of the event before main-card bouts on FOX.

At $350, his tournament buy-in is modest enough and still gives him the chance to take home a fantastic return on investment.

“I’m going into the final day with a decent amount of chips,” he said. “Hopefully, I can do something nice. I’ve got about $160,000 in chips. The average chip stack was $90,000 on the board, so I’m doing alright.”

Masvidal is known as a scrappy UFC lightweight and a onetime Strikeforce title challenger, but he said he’s played in cash games since he was a kid and recently switched to tournaments. Once, he estimates he made at least $6,000 on a run in Las Vegas.

But don’t count on seeing him in the back of some club surrounded by cigar-chewing sharks.

“That might turn hostile, and I won’t want any problems,” said Masvidal.

While his hobby pads his pocket, Masvidal said he would never quit fighting, Rounders-style, to pursue a career on the tables. But he said he does have a gift for sniffing out a bluff.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this, because I might have future competitors reading this,” he said. “I’m not great at math, and math is a huge part of poker. I can do pot odds, I can round up numbers, and I can do a couple of things. But I’m not great at math. What I am good at is reading when people are weak, so I just look for certain things. I look somebody in the eye and stare at them, like if we were going to get in a fight, and I stare at them until they get uncomfortable.”

You’d imagine the glare of a professional fighter would cause many to lose their nerve, but Masvidal said most of his opponents don’t know about his work in the cage. If they did, of course, they might know how good he is at finding weakness there. But he doesn’t play that card often.

And some MMA fans might be surprised if they knew what Masvidal wanted to do with his money. It’s hard to tell whether he’s being serious, but he claims he already has plans if he takes home the grand prize.

“I’m going to buy a farm and start growing my own vegetables and stuff, and just consume my own produce,” he said. “I’ve had plenty of cars. They come and go. I’ve got kids, and they’re getting older, and I need to have something reliable, like a nice farm where I could give them fresh food and s–t like that. Just feed ‘em right.”

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