Jim Lefteruk makes his first ever title a WSOP bracelet in $1k 6-max event

Posted on: August 28, 2020 07:28 PDT

There are just two more weeks of the 2020 World Series of Poker online to go. The main event’s initial flights are more than half over and GGPoker’s reputation appears to be declining with every day the series’s end draws closer.

But there are still bracelets to be won. Jim “grousegrind” Lefteruk won himself a glittering wristband yesterday in Event #73: $1,000 No Limit Hold’em 6-Handed. His but-in was just one of 2,202 entries making for a prize pool of $2,091,900. First place took home $299,511 from that pool, and a package for the WSOP Europe.

Lefteruk was something of a left-field winner. He has no live cashes recorded in the Hendon Mob databases and had never cashed on GGPoker before.

Curtain up

There were three and a half hours of late registration. That is fourteen 15-minute blind levels. And up to two additional rebuys per player, the starting field of around 400 players is somewhat misleading as a way of describing the scale of the event. By the second break, that number quadrupled to over 1,600.

Players started with 25,000 in chips and blinds of 100/200 with a 25 ante. Plenty of previous bracelet winners and big-name players were gone even before registration ended. For example, Luke Schwartz was dropped in a three-way all-in, while Kevin Tunder went out in a classic coin flip.

Mike Leah, Phil Join, Fedor Holz, and James Chen all hit the rail before the bubble came at 314 players.

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Bubble burst

There was no bubble boy in this tourney, as several players bought at the same time during hand-for-hand. However, history will record that high stakes regular Juan Pardo was the first to cash. His A-8 went unimproved against Conor Beresford’s A-Q.

The chip leader going into the money was Ajay “Ross_Geller” Chabra (672,340). He was hot off his first bracelet win the day before in the limit hold’em event. It’s hard to imagine a sharper change of speed from full-ring limit to 6-max no limit.

Daniel Dvoress and Kevin Rabochow were among the notables who followed Pardo to the door in the first few rounds of in-the-money play. They were joined by someone whose real name got through GGPoker’s fastidious security checks as “F**kingPRO” (but use your imagination with the asterisks).

Chabra was out of the running before too much longer too, and a new chip leader was set up in his place. But with eleven players left, the eventual winner Lefteruk was at the bottom of the leaderboards with 1.5 million in chips against the chip leader’s 10.3 million.

Winner Crowned

Play shifted to 9-handed for the final table with a pretty tight spread between the players' stacks. Every one was between 2.2 million and 9.3 million. The race was on.

That was not the case by the time heads up play arrived three hours later. By then Lefteruk had nine of every ten chips in play and his opponent Endrit "YOUWILLLOSE" Geci couldn’t have chosen a more hubristic handle.

It took minutes for the end to come. With blinds at 200k/400k, 50k ante. Both players got it in pre-flop with K-T for Geci and jacks for Lefteruk.

The first four cards (4-Q-A-T) made for a bit of a sweat. Geci picked up outs to a win with a king, a jack, or a ten. But the board paired up the queen and Lefteruk took home first.