NJ Resident Paul Tractenberg Wins FIDF National Poker Tournament

This weekend West Orange New Jersey native Paul Tractenberg (83), President of Center for Diversity and Equality in Education and Professor Emeritus at Rutgers Law School, won the first-ever Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) National Poker Tournament. According to Tractenberg, this was the first time he has ever participated in a poker tournament.

The second-place and third-place winners of the tournament were Chuck Myers from Boston, MA, and Stuart Carlin from Birmingham, MI, respectively.

Some 57 FIDF supporters, the top 10% of players from the tournament’s local qualifying rounds, came together for the final round to support the wellbeing and educational programs for Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. Joining the final round, which was livestreamed via the premier poker site Faded Spade, were prize-winning author and international poker champion Maria Konnikova, celebrity poker players Eli Elezra, Gershon Distenfeld, and commentator Jeff Platt.

“The FIDF tournament proved to be a remarkable opportunity and experience for me. Being a newbie at tournament poker, I never could have imagined finishing third in the NJ tournament let alone winning the national tournament,” said Tractenberg. “Although I’d like to think that I played with remarkable skill—and I think I did wind up playing quite well overall—the truth is, at least at the national level, that the cards began getting hotter and hotter as the tournament proceeded. In fact, I lost my first 5,000 chips pretty quickly, and the 5,000 I added must have had a special magical quality,” he added. “I really appreciated the opportunity to enjoy tournament poker for the first time while helping an extraordinarily worthwhile cause—the FIDF.”

FIDF National Poker Tournament co-chairs and Baltimore lay leaders Dror Mei Tal and Michael Steinhardt, Owner and President of Clear Path Advisory, Inc., helped expand the Mid-Atlantic Poker Tournament, a tradition in the Mid-Atlantic community for the past eight years, into a national event.