During his eight-month prison sentence in the UK, Boris Becker says he ended up with a £500 poker debt to a group of Romanian inmates. According to Becker, the unpaid debt led to direct threats inside his cell, and the money was ultimately covered by a friend outside the prison.

Becker’s Prison Sentence and Poker Background

Boris Becker was already used to public fallout by the time he landed in a UK prison in 2022. The former Wimbledon champ had been convicted of hiding assets during a bankruptcy case – including money transfers, property, and shares – and was handed a 30-month sentence. He’d end up serving just eight.

It wasn’t his first run-in with the law, though. Back in 2002, Becker had been convicted in Germany for filing false tax documents to dodge over €1 million in payments. That time, he avoided prison.

After stepping away from tennis in the late ’90s, Becker found his way into poker. He played in WPT and EPT events, cashed for just over $100,000, and even signed on as a PokerStars ambassador for several years – he’d also wear a PartyPoker badge later down the line.

Behind bars, he turned to poker again – not for money, but more so to stay occupied. And it didn’t go the way he expected.

The Poker Game That Nearly Cost Him

While serving his sentence, Becker played a marathon poker game with a group of Romanian inmates. The sessions stretched over several days and ended with him owing £500.

Becker says the men he played with weren’t casual players. “Real criminals,” he called them. When the debt wasn’t paid quickly, they showed up at his cell and made their point clear. “They came into my cell and threatened me if I didn’t pay,” he told SZ-Magazin, a German publication.

Becker couldn’t cover the debt on his own, so he reached out to a friend for the money to be transferred. His friend would later send the money.

Physical and Mental Toll of Incarceration

In interviews promoting his memoir, Becker spoke plainly about the psychological weight of his sentence. “It eats away at your soul and boils your mind,” he told SZ-Magazin, describing the disorientation of daily life inside. He said he lost seven kilos during his first four weeks in prison, and described nights so cold that he slept in multiple layers – “two jackets and two pairs of socks,” along with a tracksuit and a towel wrapped around his head.

The conditions were very basic – his cell had a narrow cot topped with a plastic mattress and a metal toilet with no seat. At night, Becker said, the screams of other inmates made sleep hard to come by. Not to mention, the experience has stayed with him long after his release. “In bed, I lie so close to the edge that I almost fall out,” he said. “When I sleep, even the largest mattress turns into a narrow cot.”

Life After Prison — Memoir, Family, and Poker

Since his release, Becker has been promoting Inside, the memoir where he details his time in prison and the fallout that followed. He’s now based in Italy and recently attended the Sport-Bild Awards in Hamburg alongside his partner, Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro, a political risk analyst. The couple is expecting their first child together – Becker’s fifth.

The experience behind bars has clearly left a lasting mark, “You’ll never completely shake that time,” he told SZ-Magazin. Even now, years removed from his release, he describes a lingering discomfort – a shift in the way he carries himself and sees the world.

Poker is still part of his life, but the games he played in prison aren’t something he looks back on lightly. “I had played poker professionally after tennis, so I thought, what could go wrong?” he said. “But I was playing with real criminals.” Reflecting on the risk he took, he called the decision “foolish.” 

Bonus: An ex-NBA player was arrested for running illegal high stakes poker games.