Sara Chafak - Meet Miss Finland Poker

Whether it is a beauty pageant or a high-stakes game of poker, Sara Chafak has developed a reputation for winning both. When you first see the former Miss Finland 2012, you may be tempted to judge her on her looks, but it’s her intellect that you ought to pay attention to, especially if she is bluffing you.

Chafak quickly rose to prominence after she bluffed professional poker player Ronnie Bardah, who won the 2012 World Series of Poker, to win a $1,308,000 pot in a game of Texas Hold’em poker.

Although a relative minnow in the poker community, Miss Finland poker was immediately etched into the history of the coolest hand plays in the history of the game, leaving Bardah incredulous at what had happened. She would not stop there.

But who is Sara Chafak, really, and how did she come to be such an icon, in her own right, in the poker world? We set out to find this and more.

Miss Finland poker and her claim to fame

Chafak has hardly limited herself to just one thing. A gifted songwriter, singer, TV host, model and TV personality, Miss Finland also took a swing at poker, and she did remarkably well.

Not surprising, as it turned out that she had enjoyed poker for a long while before one fateful event in Barcelona, Spain.

She professed her love for many things as a child, from joining the army to winning a beauty pageant to becoming a professional poker player. She has achieved most of those.

During an episode of The Shark Cage in 2014, a PokerStars reality show dedicated to bringing all sorts of interesting personalities together, along with poker pros, and pitting them against each other in a game of Texas Hold’em, among others, Chafak had to choose.

Let Ronnie Bardah take the round or bluff him hard. She chose the latter and Bardah, a clever player as he was, ostentatiously failed to register that he was being played, gasping in disbelief as the cards were revealed and Miss Finland beat him for the $1,308,000 pot that iconic round.

He ended up behind bars, as one of the whimsical twists of the show was that players who had made a poor play or ended up with a bad bluff would have to sit in a cage, adding to the entertainment value of the production.

Bardah, a sharp and quick-witted player was not upset with Chafak either, feeling mortified that he had just been bluffed by a relative poker novice on, as he put it, "national television, on international television."

"Is this real life," Bardah asked the table in general to the merriment of fellow players, among whom was Kara Scott, another woman and 888poker ambassador who would end up eliminating him from the table just a few dealings after the iconic bluff. Bardah was not having a good time, although he kept his happy face on.

The episode was of course peppered with many anecdotical interviews and cut-scene interviews. Bardah got visibly curious when he heard he would be playing against Miss Sara – or Miss Finland poker as she would become known after this bout – but vowed to show his fellow players no mercy ahead of the game.

Chafak quickly remarked in one of the segments that she bluffed Bardah successfully because others were keen to underestimate her, not least because she was a woman, but also a beauty pageant winner. For his part, Bardah remained hopeful.

Maybe he would end up in the cage with Miss Finland for a while, he mused on camera, cackling to himself and retaining his good spirit, only to be ousted by another femme fatale a few dealing later.

Beauty queen, poker savant, and master of bluffs

Although you could have dismissed Sara Chafak as a pretty little thing who just got lucky, and perhaps was a little too hard for Bardah to resist at first, Miss Finland proved that she was a dab hand at the game.

The Shark Cage itself may be a lighthearted format, and players are a little more relaxed, but this does not detract from Miss Finland’s poker performance either way.

In that same episode, she had bluffed Bardah and won $1,308,000 with her all-in move, she pulled off something similar against Jean-Robert Bellande, another professional player who was participating. She was running an Ace and Queen against Bellande Ace and 3 and was bluffing that she took the round’s pot worth $1,067,000.

Reading the table, Bellande decided that Chafak had much better odds of turning a stronger hand and folding.

But guess what?

Chafak was bluffing again. She had 12% to win against Bellande’s hand of Ace and 3 with the four cards at the turn being 2, Ace, 9 and a Queen.

He might have made a mental note of the encounter, but a few hands later, Chafak pressed on going all-in for a $2,765,000 round pot, and this time, Miss Finland poker delivered and beat Bellande without a bluff.

She had 10 and 7 against Bellande’s 7 and 2, who decided not to fall for Miss Finland’s poker bluffs ever again.

He was wrong.

It was almost incredulous to see some of the best poker players in the world bluffed out of their money by this gorgeous woman on reality TV, and although you could ask questions about the authenticity of the show, the plays were real.

Sara and Kara would make the head-to-head final table and play against each other, after a fun-filled session against loquacious opponents and befuddled professional players. Ultimately, the title would go to Kara, who was herself a seasoned poker pro and poker ambassador, but it would not matter.

Sara Chafak was forever etched in the collective consciousness of the community as Miss Finland Poker.

How did Miss Finland poker get started?

The biography of Chafak is equally interesting and had Bellande or Bardah bothered to find out a few things about the ravishingly good-looking woman sitting across from them at the table, they might had made it to the final.

Yet, Chafak was a player of relative obscurity in the poker scene prior to her appearance on PokerStars’ The Shark Cage in 2014.

She had always wanted to be a poker player (and Miss Finland, although not necessarily winning a beauty pageant) – starting with a few games at home, she soon discovered that she wasn’t bad at the game at all.

What started as a hobby horse she was introduced to by her boyfriend at the time, quickly turned out to be an activity Chafak loved to do, and as she puts it – she is the type of person to give her one hundred per cent when she takes up a task. Hence, why she can spin so many plates and feel energized by the mounting pile of responsibility.

Anyway, when she turned 19, Chafak quickly realized that she could be playing the game "for real," and so she started visiting various pubs in Finland that would host poker games, which were legal at the time, and small-pool games were.

She achieved quick success and even won a qualifying ticket to an important Main Event she couldn’t attend because she was down with a severe case of the flu.

She was disappointed that she would miss out on what was by far the biggest achievement in her poker pastime and even tried to get her doctor to let her go, but he flatly refused.

Chafak naturally felt disheartened and soon gave up on her poker hobby, focusing on her education instead, which took her to a university in Estonia. Not much later after, she won the Miss Finland pageant and decided to go back home.

Rediscovering her passion for poker back in Finland

Chafak also rekindled her love for poker and quickly started playing again. She was eventually spotted by PokerStars, who found out that Miss Finland was also an aspiring poker player. The company convinced her to join a tournament format that involved various celebrities, to help popularize the game, but Chafak was hesitant and not really keen on publicity at all.

However, she thought that she could do it on her own terms – at the hairdresser’s. So, she would sit there, having her hair done, and she told PokerStars, that if they still wanted her to participate, she could play in the event, and they could film it. She must have been at least partially hoping the company to baulk at the idea and leave her be.

They loved it.

Chafak would eventually win that PokerStars qualifier event and make it into the Barcelona, Spain event, which was none other than The Shark Cage in which Miss Finland will make her claim to poker glory by bluffing both Bardah and Bellande, and making it to the very final where she would play against Kara Scott and not make it further.

What are Sara Chafak's poker winnings?

Actually, you will be somewhat hard-pressed to find any record of Sara Chafak’s poker winnings.

Handemob, one of the foremost authorities on tracking professional player winnings puts her at $292 total live earnings, and this could make sense, as she started playing at local pubs in Finland, and then progressed to online poker.

Besides, she is naturally shy and not really hungry for the limelight. Based on several accounts, though, she could be a prolific poker player, with estimated earnings that could top anything between $1m and $1.5m as of the time of writing this, and no sure way to verify this claim.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Chafak has not really been in the public eye following her claim to glory back in 2014 as a poker player. Retrieving in relevant obscurity and shrouded in a bit of poker mystery, Miss Finland’s poker earnings remain anyone’s guess.

Miss Finland who won’t be defined by her poker bluffs

Many skeptics could have looked at those games in 2014 and thought – Bardah and Bellande were only messing around. Yet, for anyone who has looked closely, Miss Finland was immediately someone to keep on your radar.

She may have bluffed her way through some outrageous hands that left much more experienced and arguably successful players subdued and resigned, mustering a gentle fist bump as an acknowledgement of her composure and poker face.

Yet, she did play the game well and almost topped the field back in that iconic The Shark Cage episode. Bardah and Bellande would try to read her and often fail.

Miss Finland, though, would go on to become a TV star, actress, and model, and promote poker among young people. She would always move imperceptibly though and never be defined by one thing – whether it is her Moroccan origins, her passion for cooking, her soft spot for "boyish stuff," or anything else.

A true give-one-hundred-percent-of-myself person, Miss Finland has excelled, perhaps not to poker preeminence, but certainly to a place in our collective memory that places her on a pedestal as one of the most fascinating if transitory players of the past decade.

As a beloved TV character once joked, "Nobody can be this good-looking and that good at a game." Chafak did not have a problem with being both.

Image credit: PokerStars (@Youtube)