After a week on the auction block, Peter Eastgate’s gold World Series of Poker bracelet has been sold.
Due to ebay’s privacy policy, which allows only anonymous user IDs to be visible in the item listing, and the fact that since the bidding closed Thanksgiving morning the winner hasn’t come forward, the poker world continues to sit in the dark on the $147,500 sale of the 2008 Main Event bracelet. Who bought it?
Tony G said in his latest two Party Poker blog posts that he was in on the bidding early, and still active around the $50,000 mark, threatening to transform it into “The ultimate dog bling” for Zasko, his German Shepherd. “Carry on bidding, this bracelet is going to go for six figures,” Tony G blogged.
InterPoker caught wind of Tony G’s plans and responded, “The entire poker community should feel insulted by Tony G’s reasons for wanting the bracelet and InterPoker will do everything it can to prevent him winning. InterPoker wants to give the bracelet the respect it deserves by offering it as a prize for the InterPoker.com Champion of Champions event in 2011 and keep the bracelet within the poker community.”
The winning bidder, listed as anonymous user “7***l”, jumped in on the bidding at $80,000. After the auction opened a week prior with a $16,000 opening bid, the 116th and final bid in the listing’s last half hour meant that Eastgate’s chosen charity, UNICEF, would be getting $147,500.
Eastgate, the youngest Main Event champ ever at the time of his ’08 win, decided to hang it up this year and walk away from the game of poker and a lucrative PokerStars deal prior to the 2010 WSOP. The kid from Denmark outlasted 6,843 players, including the first experiment with the November Nine delay, to earn $9 million and the beautiful 18kt white gold Corum bracelet with 291 diamonds. Eastgate decided the jewelry was “just lying around collecting dust,” and UNICEF could get a nice Paypal transfer on his behalf.
