Justin Arnwine winning a WSOP bracelet today wouldn’t just be a nice little poker story. It could be a whole damned movie. And not one of those overproduced ones where everybody’s too pretty and nobody looks like they’ve ever slept in a bus station.
This is a guy who did not come up through poker the easy way. He came up the bus-ticket way. The barely-have-a-bankroll way. The “sleep when you can, eat what you can, play what you can afford” way.
Today, Arnwine has a Top 5 chip stack in the $1,500 six-handed NLHE event at the World Series of Poker, and he's the guy I'll be watching to win his first WSOP braclet.
Hello Kitty, hello first WSOP bracelet?
If you don't already know Justin, you need to know a few things about him. The first and most important thing is, he is a tournament crusher. The second is, nobody spoon-fed him a poker career. He didn’t learn tournament poker because somebody handed him a chart and a hoodie with a sponsor patch on it. He learned it because he was sitting in low-stakes cash games with a tiny stack, trying to make the right decision with 30 big blinds and no safety net.
Funny thing about that: living short-stacked for real will teach you a little something about playing short-stacked for bracelets.
He’s already a closer. More than 140 wins. And, yeah, he does it wearing his signature Hello Kitty gear. Because why not?
So, that's who I'm watching today. There's $346,000 up top today. More importantly, there is a WSOP bracelet he'll be gunning for.
Justin is a grinder’s grinder, the kind of player who has been finishing tournaments for years without the poker world stopping to build him a statue. If anybody has the game to finish with a bracelet, it's this guy. His story is what the WSOP is all about.
