Rafe Furst

Mr. Furst is founder and CTO of Expert Insight, a multi-award winning media company, and a poker pro representing Full Tilt Poker. His early career was spent in computer science research at Kestrel Institute. Following his dream of weaving sports and entrepreneurship, Mr. Furst co-founded Pickem Sports in 1997 to bring promotional sports contests to the then-nascent World Wide Web. He subsequently sold Pickem to Internet Sports Network but remained for two years as the CTO before embarking on a travel odyssey through Europe, Africa and South America, eventually leading up to the yearlong Ultimate Sports Adventure. During that trip he and Phil Gordon teamed up to raise $100,000 for Prevent Cancer Foundation and launched the grass-roots fundraising initiative, Bad Beat on Cancer, which became an official part of the 2007 World Series of Poker (WSOP).

Mr. Furst, a life-long poker player, has had more than 200 media appearances globally. In 2006 he won a coveted WSOP Gold Bracelet in the largest pot-limit holdem field in history. Along with Phil Gordon and friends, he published Tales from the TiltBoys, a book which chronicles tales of adventure and friendship around the game of poker. Mr. Furst holds an MS in Computer Science and BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. He is a board member of the Prevent Cancer Foundation and has received a Congressional Families award for Excellence in Cancer Awareness. He received production credit on four feature films and five instructional videos.