News / nono / 10 June 2008 / Leave a comment

Brooks is a 48-year-old business owner. He is married and has two children.

Brooks collected $415,856 for first place. He also earned his first WSOP gold bracelet.

Incredibly, Brooks announced that he will donate the entire cash prize to a non-profit charity called the Decision Education Foundation. He make the following remarks in a post-tournament interview:

No, (I did not expect to win). I guess all of us went home last night and thought about winning. We are all certainly hoping to win. But realistically, these are all really good players. You have to get lucky three days in the row, for sure, to win.

(The Decision Education Foundation) is an organization that I really believe in. I'm on the board and I joined a few years ago. Essentially what we do is we take the science of decision making, which is something that's university level, college course work, and (teach the basic principles to grades) K-12 around the country. Our mission is to make everybody aware that this fantastic curriculum is available and really what I call the forgotten subject of decision making. It's something that gets introduced in a formal matter to the classroom. We had a lot of success with it so far, and being able to add another $400,000 (my winnings) to it and what their doing in going to be pretty big.

It's the process of making a decision and then the application of how you use the decision making skill....our goal is to help (young people) and possibly their parents as well understand the process of what the right answers are. We don't tell you what you should do, we help you make the structure and work through a rational process and discover for yourself what the right answer is.

I feel good about what happened today.

I'm done. I'm leaving (Las Vegas) tomorrow and heading to Oregon for my father's 85th birthday.