Jeff Haney on how a baker cooked up a delicious dessert of $1.05 million by winning World Poker Tour event in Reno

Wednesday, April 5, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.

RENO - Veteran professional player Barry Greenstein, with his advanced math skills, millions of dollars in winnings and almost four decades of experience at the tables, can analyze a given situation in poker better than almost anyone.

And so it was last week at the final table of the World Poker Challenge at the Reno Hilton, the latest stop on the lucrative made-for-TV World Poker Tour.

Asked to handicap the remaining five-player field after he was ousted in sixth place - the first player eliminated from the final table - Greenstein offered what would pan out as a prescient breakdown.

"There's never a clear winner," said Greenstein, a popular figure on the poker circuit. "They're pretty evenly matched, and they're all playing well. A lot of times in poker, it comes down to luck. So whoever gets the luckiest will end up the winner."

Greenstein, as usual, was correct.

The five players slugged it out for another 6 1/2 hours Thursday night, with no one establishing himself as an undisputed front-runner, before Minnesotan Mike Simon emerged as the champion. Simon collected the top prize of $1.05 million plus a $25,000 seat in the World Poker Tour Championship tournament April 18-24 at the Bellagio.

Once it became heads-up, Simon put a series of "bad beats" - hands in which the winner gets lucky as an underdog and that are especially grueling for the loser - on runner-up Jason Stern of San Jose, Calif.

"Everybody I play with in my garage game will tell you I take hundreds of these (bad beats) every month," Simon, a baker for 30 years, said. "It is destiny, no question, in my mind. How else could this have happened?"

The bad beats provided plenty of excitement for the crowd in the Hilton's Silver State Pavilion, including an overflow of spectators watching a video feed in an adjacent lobby, but only frustration for Stern.

"I hope to make up for it in the future," Stern said. "Obviously I'm not in the best of moods."

Stern won $529,300 for finishing second in the tournament, which carried a buy in of $5,000 and attracted a field of 592 entrants. It is scheduled to air June 21 on the Travel Channel (Cox Cable channel 66).

The prize pool of more than $2.8 million was the largest ever for a Northern Nevada event. (Save the world's tallest midget jokes, please.)

The next Las Vegas tour stop will be the season finale at the Bellagio, giving Simon a hot hand heading into that tournament, which is expected to draw about 600 players and generate a prize pool approaching $15 million.

Greenstein, who earned the biggest cheers from the crowd during pregame introductions, collected $85,370 for finishing sixth.

Greenstein of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., by way of Chicago, donates all of his tournament winnings to charity, earning the nickname "Robin Hood of Poker."

Half of his winnings are donated to Children Inc., which works to assist needy children in 21 countries including the United States, and half to other charities, Greenstein said.

With the second-highest amount of chips heading into the final table, Greenstein was a consensus favorite to take the title. On just the fourth hand of the day, however, Greenstein lost most of his chips to Simon when two eights hit the flop. Greenstein was holding king-8 but Simon, holding ace-8, had him outkicked.

"If you get the wrong hand at the wrong time, you're history, and that's what happened," Greenstein said. "I flopped three of a kind, and that's a hard hand to get away from."

Still, Greenstein, a regular in the high-limit cash games at the Bellagio, likes his chances in the World Poker Tour Championship.

"It's a very big tournament, and I hope to make the final table there, too," he said. "But to do that, I've got to get lucky - and not unlucky, like I did here."