Indiana Man Wins Best Damn Poker Show

Jason Kirk | March 10, 2009

Patrick Karst will have plenty of time to relax now that he's won UltimateBet's Best Damn Poker Show

Patrick Karst played an awful lot of poker to become the champion of FSN’s Best Damn Poker Show. While the show’s other 23 contestants were chosen by the producers, Patrick, a 51-year-old conveyor building company team leader from Markle, Ind., earned his way on the show by winning a series of four satellite tournaments on UltimateBet. Along the way to becoming the only online qualifier on the show, he saw somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,000 other players hit the rail.

“It’s overwhelming when I stand back and look at it now,” Karst said in an interview with BLUFF. “To win that, I still can’t believe it.”

Just as unbelievable was his whirlwind run through the rest of the field on the FSN series that’s part poker tournament, part reality television. In the preliminary rounds Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth both praised his play as “flawless,” which Karst says gave him a pretty big ego boost - in his words, “maybe too much.” But when he made mistakes later he was able to get lucky, helping him to claim the win against two players Patrick himself will tell you were the best on the show, Shaun Van Asdale and Jason Lee.

“Someone once said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good,” says Karst. “Sometimes that’s what it takes.”

Having Duke as his team leader on the show was something special for the champion, as she’s been one of his poker heroes since he started playing regularly in 2006. His admiration for her goes back to when he began watching poker on television, when he saw a segment on Duke and her family during one of the tournaments she was playing. “It seemed like she really has it all - family, kids, being able to play poker,” says Patrick, a father of three himself. “I’m pretty much all about family, too.”

For her part, Duke says she’s impressed with his feat. “Patrick is one of the nicest people I have ever met and for that I am very happy that he won. I was very glad to have him on my team. It is an amazing thing about poker that someone could start in a freeroll against that many people and end up with a trip to the WSOP and Aruba, playing for prize pools worth more than $60M.”

Even Hellmuth, whose team went down in defeat, praised Karst’s play. “You have to give Patrick a ton of credit. First he beats thousands of players in the Ultimatebet.net free online event to make it onto the Best Damn Poker Show. Then he beats another 18 people on the show to make the final cut, and amazingly he beats the last six remaining players to take down the title. Too bad he was on Team Duke.”

For emerging as the show’s best damn player, Patrick earned entries and travel to the Aruba Poker Classic and the WSOP Main Event. He says Aruba didn’t go as well as BDPS, but it was a “nice family vacation.” But the WSOP? Win or lose, that’s the big one. “It just doesn’t get any better than that. It’ll be the experience of a lifetime.”

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