When Michael Mizrachi won both the $50K Poker Players Championship and the $10K Main Event at the 2025 WSOP, it was widely hailed as an incredible feat — one that seemed unlikely to be repeated.
According to Mizrachi himself, Phil Ivey went one step further, calling it the “biggest accomplishment in sports history.”
Mizrachi was talking on the latest episode of 888Ride with David Tuchman when he was asked about the immediate aftermath of his victory in the 2025 Main Event.
Mizrachi was instantly inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, despite Nick Schulman already having been named the sole member of the Class of 2025. Just ahead of the 2025 series in Las Vegas, Ty Stewart, Executive Director of the WSOP, had reiterated that “we are deciding to keep it one inductee per year.” That rule was promptly overturned after Mizrachi’s historic double.
Biggest feat in sporting history?
Asked about this, Mizrachi recalled a conversation between Jared Bleznick and Phil Ivey about whether what he’d done was “the biggest accomplishment in poker history.”
Mizrachi continued, “He [Bleznick] said, ‘No, no, I think this is the biggest accomplishment in gambling history,’ and Phil Ivey said, ‘No, Jared, this is the biggest accomplishment in sports history.’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ It was an amazing compliment from Ivey and Bleznick.”
“So I feel like they had to do it. My family, my friends, everyone was there. So I think it was great for poker to do it at a time after I won the Main Event. And you know, next year, I was most likely going to get picked anyway, so now they can [induct someone else] next year. And I get to join Nick Schulman, who I’ve been playing with for years.”
“What a class of 2025,” Tuchman said.
You can watch the full interview with Mizrachi below.
How does this poker feat stack up against the all-time greats?
If you want to test out Ivey’s theory, Mizrachi has some tough competition.
How about Usain Bolt’s 100m world record at the 2008 Beijing Olympics? He’d run a world record 9.72 seconds a few months earlier and then, after a slow start in Beijing, bettered that with a time of 9.69 seconds, despite celebrating 20 metres out.
Usain Bolt celebrates after setting a new world record in the 100m in Beijing in 2008.John Daly won the 1991 PGA Championship after getting in as ninth alternate. Leicester City won the Premier League in the UK in 2016 as 5000/1 outsiders. And staying in the same league, Arsenal won the 2003/04 Premier League without losing a single match.
And we haven’t even mentioned Jesse Owen’s four golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Michael Phelps’ 23 Olympic Golds, Eliud Kipchoge running a sub-two-hour marathon, or Johnny Vander Meer's consecutive no-hitters in 1938.
That’s nowhere near an exhaustive list, and it would be a stretch to put Mizrachi at the top. However, if you take odds as the only barometer, he’d be right up there. The odds of winning both of those tournaments this summer would have been astronomical.
