From The Felt Into The Boxing Ring

"There will be blood," Sorel Mizzi warned his followers on Twitter yesterday morning. ‘

Brian Rast replied setting the stage for an unusual battle between two top poker players. No, you won’t see them playing four tables heads-up on some poker site for x amount of hours, instead you will see Mizzi and Rast throwing punches at each other in a real boxing ring. They'll be fighting for money, but it’s all for charity as both confirmed yesterday.

And of course, these two have gone head-2-head a number of times before, although typically on the felt. Check out the bluff game from this clip of the two:

The boxing match is scheduled for December 30, 2015 at 6:00 PM at the Syndicate Mixed Martial Arts Gym in Las Vegas. Tickets are available for all and cost $20 for a regular seat and $80 for VIP. What does VIP mean? Limited ringside seats where you can watch Mizzi knock out Rast in style or at least that’s what the Canadian said.

This may be be very well the case on December 30 as Sorel outweighs Brian by quite a margin - maybe 30 lbs? - and the Canadian also spent some quality time in the army - as a reserve though - after finishing high-school. His army training may prove useful in the battle against the American.

However, this won’t take as long as a REAL boxing match. The poker players will fight for just four two-minute rounds so grinding the game down is out of the question. Most likely, whoever punches harder - Mizzi? - will win the encounter.

All the funds raised from the event will be donated to REG Charity - Raising for Effective Giving - a project created by the poker community ‘to maximize their effective positive impact on the world.'

About Brian Rast

Brian Rast may be the underdog in the boxing match but he is clearly the better poker player if we take a look at the numbers. According to HendonMob DB, he has won $16,275,850 so far in his live tournament poker career, good enough for 11th on the All-Time Money List. He has two World Series of Poker bracelets - 2011 $1,500 PLO and 2011 $50,000 Poker Players Championship, 8-Game and he also won five different High Rollers, the latest one being taken down in July 2015 at the Super High Roller Bowl where he cashed in over $7.5 million.

About Sorel Mizzi

The Army Man from Toronto, Canada's Sorel Mizzi has started gambling since he was a little boy playing games with his parents and two brothers. On the life poker felt, he has earned $11,148,822 ranking fourth in the Canada All-Time Money List. He didn’t win a major WSOP bracelet nor a EPT and WPT Main Event tournament but he did win several major side events including the 2011 WPT Rendez-Vous à Paris and the 2012 WPT Vienna High Rollers. Mizzi is also known in the online poker community playing high-stake games on iPoker - under the username of ‘Imper1um’ - PokerStars and PartyPoker.