Poker players and personalities Mike Sexton and Bruno Fitoussi will be presented with the WPT Honors Award for their outstanding contributions to the growth of the World Poker Tour brand and the game of poker, as a whole.
Sexton and Fitoussi will be the second and third recipients of the award, with professional poker player and journalist Linda Johnson being the only other person to have been honored previously. They will receive their awards at a special dinner ceremony, slated to take place on July 1 in Las Vegas.
It can be said that Sexton was one of the founding fathers of the WPT brand. He was the one to gather together Steve Lipscomb and Linda Johnson and the three of them then developed the WPT concept, which has grown over the past 15 years into one of the leading live tournament poker brands with lavish festivals taking place all over the world throughout the year.
Sexton was the mastermind behind the WPT Tournament of Champions, an annual tournament held to celebrate the end of the WPT Main Tour season. He was also a co-commentator alongside Vince Van Patten for fifteen seasons.
It is also important to note that Sexton has been part of the world of poker for more than four decades now. And aside from being the man behind some of the most popular poker brands, he is also a savvy player himself. He has taken part in numerous prestigious tournaments over the course of his poker career and even joined the WPT Champions Club in 2016 after winning the partypoker.net WPT Montreal C$3,500 Main Event.
If Sexton was responsible for the creation of the WPT brand, Fitoussi was probably the person with the greatest contribution to its popularization across Europe and in France, in particular.
And it was namely Fitoussi who brought poker to France back in the 1990s. He introduced his homeland to Texas Hold’em by making it available at the legendary Aviation Club de France. His endeavor turned out to be extremely successful as the game appealed to club visitors quite a lot. This helped the venue turn into one of the most popular meeting spots for poker players from all around the world.
As mentioned above, Fitoussi introduced the French poker community to the World Poker Tour brand. During WPT’s first season, the popular poker tour traveled to the country for the Euro Finals of Poker festival. Shortly after, Fitoussi became the face of the game and of WPT on French television.
