Back in Action: Champions Club Member Joe Bartholdi Returns to WPT 12 Years After Massive Win

By Sean Chaffin

One name stands out a bit this week at the WPT Borgata Poker Open. As Day 2 continued on Tuesday afternoon, Joe Bartholdi (pictured) was among those battling it out. It’s been a while, but WPT fans may remember Bartholdi as the winner of the $25,500 WPT Championship in 2006 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

The tournament was part of the Fourth Annual Five-Star World Poker Classic and featured 605 entries. Bartholdi took home a massive $3.76 million for his win. Since that time, he’s not been seen much on tour stops.

So what brought him back to the felt at the Borgata?

“Just getting out of town,” he says. “My wife and I are cash game players in Las Vegas. And it’s just a vacation really. We’re going to go up to New Hampshire and Vermont, and drive around some parts of the country that we both really haven’t seen. This was just kind of a stop on our road trip.”

Massive Win

Amazingly, Bartholdi’s score in 2006 still puts him in 12-place on the WPT all-time money leaderboard with one cash, one final table, one title.

Nowadays, however, he’s much more of a cash game player and just not much on the tournament scene. He had one score in a tournament at the Venetian this summer, but before that his last tournament cash was in 2013. His tournament play has been spartan through the years, and his winnings are $4.2 million.

“Even when I won the WPT, I was mostly a cash game player,” says the 38-year-old Bartholdi, who grew up in Riverside, Calif., and moved to Las Vegas with his family at age 17. “I play cash in Vegas four or five days a week.”

Back at the Bellagio in 2006, Bartholdi’s win stood out for another reason. As events came to a close, WPT commentator Mike Sexton raised his glass for the traditional winner’s toast. Bartholdi wasn’t about to simply take a sip.

He raised bottle of Budweiser and tipped it back – shotgunning the entire bottle then turning it upside down. A single drop was all that was left and it was quite a start to his victory celebration.

Poker Boom

Looking back, Bartholdi’s victory was right in the middle of the poker boom that exploded in the U.S. in the early- and mid-2000s. Online poker was fueling the game as well as broadcasts of the WPT and World Series of Poker on television. Prize pools were huge and entries were booming.

But for Bartholdi, poker was just a pursuit he had taken up to make a living. The win was great but hadn’t been a real goal.

“It was great for me,” he says of that win. “I had started in poker kind of before it boomed. I was playing Limit Hold’em in Las Vegas a few years before it boomed. So poker to me was never really like a ‘cool thing.’ There were old ladies playing Seven Card Stud, and my father was a poker dealer and I was kind of doing it because I was in that world.

“So there wasn’t as much excitement for me about being a poker player. It was kind of just what I was doing, and then it kind of exploded around me. So the money was great, but it wasn’t like I had fulfilled that dream to be a poker player or anything like that. I was just making a good investment.”

Twelve years later, Bartholdi continues to make a nice living playing poker. He didn’t make any major purchases right away after his WPT score, and feels he dodged some bullets in keeping it.

“It was like the height of the housing market,” he says. “I was advised that it was about to crash so I didn’t buy a fancy house. And then it did crash.”

When not playing poker or traveling, Bartholdi and his wife Gaia enjoy making music together. He plays acoustic guitar and writes songs, and they recently formed a band called “Fukbot and Cash Machine.”

“Some of my songs are online, but we haven’t published them under that name yet,” he says. “So this is a good opportunity to get the name out there. It’s a good band name.”

A second WPT win over a decade after his first would be quite a story, and possibly a bit of inspiration for another song. Bartholdi hoped lightning could strike twice at the WPT, adding: “Let’s talk again after I hopefully win this one 12 years later.

The song will have to wait as Bartholdi was eliminated midway through Day 2. There’s a chance a new tune may soon be written at a later event. 

Sean Chaffin is a freelance writer in Crandall, Texas, and host of the True Gambling Stories podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @PokerTraditions.