Shoma Ishikawa makes history as he takes the first bracelet by a non-US resident in the series
The international portion of the 2020 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Online Bracelet Series kicked off this past weekend; however, several problems with the servers caused two events to be postponed. Therefore, Event #34 was the first tournament that was played all the way to the final table, and the winner - from Japan - got his first-ever gold bracelet. Shoma “pp_syon” Ishikawa defeated a field of 2,214 entries in the $525 buy-in super turbo bounty six-max No-Limit Hold’em event. He made history for being the first player to ever win a WSOP gold bracelet in an online event held outside of the US.
In addition to that, Ishikawa just became the third player from Japan to win a WSOP bracelet - previous winners were Naoya Kihara and Takahiro Nakai at the 2012 $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha six-max winner and 2015 $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em champion, respectively. For Event #34, the total number of re-entries created a final prize pool of $1,107,000, meaning that Ishikawa took home the top prize of $117,650 in addition to the gold bracelet.
As the tournament name describes, this was a turbo event, so it took just a little over three hours to crown a winner. A total of 314 players made it to the money for a minimum cash out of $567. This poker tournament was also filled with talented players who did not make it to the final table; however, they were able to cash out. Among these were Chance Kornuth, who finished 311th, four-time World Poker Tour champion Darren Elias, who finished 266th, and even Adrian Mateos, who finished in 76th place.
