A J Kelsall wins WSOPC Global Casino Championship for $275,632

Posted on: September 14, 2020 06:23 PDT

The WSOP GCC played out over the weekend, crowning a champion yesterday.

A J "RandyLerch" Kelsall took home first. He won $275,632 and what could be the last WSOP bracelet of 2020 if they don't announce a brick-and-mortar series in the next few months.

In fact, it could quite possibly be the last bracelet to ever come with a prize in U.S. dollars, rather than in canned food or NukaCola caps.

The event attracted 130 qualifying players. 7 of these players were not offered a free ride and coughed up $10k for the privilege of playing. This made for a prize pool of $1,070,000, split among the top 20 finishers.

2020 Strikes Again

Since 2011, the WSOPC has ended with a tournament-of-champions-style event. It has gone by several names in the past. Lately, it is the "Global Casino Championship." A name that is retained this year even though the casinos are closed and we shouldn’t be visiting them even if they’re not.

The World Series of Poker Circuit events do more to earn the “World” in their title than the Vegas based WSOP. The WSOPC scheduled events for this year’s Circuit in Russia, France, Czechia, St Maartin, Morocco, and Spain.

There would still be plenty of opportunities to bag a WSOPC ring in the States, but the language used is at least less solipsistic here than its equivalent in baseball.

Then the coughing started, cancelations went round the world, and the GCC moved online.

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GGPoker steps up

Luckily for the WSOP, they still have an international partner in GGPoker. So GGPoker put the game on for them.

GGPoker's software might be fickle, but the organization has already proven they can weather the PR storm of mishandling a whole series. They were absolutely ready to deal with a single 130-person event.

In their defense, it all went pretty smoothly.

Entry levels

The rules this year are that the top fifty players on the U.S.-only WSOPC Player of the Year leaderboard all got a seat. They were joined by any main event ring winners from the bits of the series that ran.

Other ring winners and the 18/19 series’s top 100 POY finishers had the option to buy in rake for $10,000.

The tourney's prize pool started out at $1,000,000. Seven additional buy-ins from the players who paid for their seats brought the total up to $1,070,000.

The players would normally all meet at one casino and duke it out for the cameras. This time GGPoker hosted and Twitch streamed the coverage.

The usual suspects

A sense of the prestige of this event can be found in the fact that the battle to be the final table bubble boy was between Daniel Negreanu (9th for $26,643) and Mike Matusow (10th for $22,898). Two enormous names.

Other notable cashes went to Ken “kdonarski” Donarski (11th for $22,898), Faisal “desigolfer” Siddiqui (13th - $20,330), Charlie “Badrabbit” Dawson (14th for $17,869), Richard “unclebets” Bai (18th for $16,264), Scott “stpauli111” Hall (19th for $16,264), and David “TheClubber” Larson (20th for $16,264).

Kelsall played Michael "annie_r_u_ok" Trivett heads up.

Eventually, Kelsall eliminated Trivett when filled up his wheel draw on the turn. Trivett had a pair. It wasn't enough, and Kelsall became quite possibly the very last person to sit at a WSOP table in 2020.