It’s the bubble of the 2024 WSOP Main Event, and Cody Daniels is doing everything he can to think more about playing cards than he thinks about the bandages he has on both hands. He looks up at a reporter standing on the other side of the table and holds up the hands. He has a blue wrap on one thumb, a white one on the other. At a distance it looks like he’s shrugging, but if you get closer you see it’s not shrugging. It’s struggling.
“They couldn’t find a vein,” he said.
Less than an hour earlier, when the other 1,500 people left in the Main Event were getting coffee and breakfast, Daniels was getting a banana bag of electrolytes, anti-nausea meds, and oxygen. He’d taken refuge in the quiet confines of the PokerOrg lounge while a nurse did everything to get Daniels ready to compete.
“It took them five tries,” Daniels said.
He still looked miserable. Within the next two hours, he’d watch more than 1,500 people experience the joy of cashing in the WSOP Main Event. A few others would bust short of the money, and though everyone who left without money might have felt miserable, none of them were feeling like Daniels, a guy who didn’t even know if he was going to be here today. He didn’t know he was going to be in the Main. He couldn’t even be sure he’d be alive.
That’s life as Cody Daniels knows it. It’s as he’s known it for most of his life. It’s as he knows it as he unexpectedly finds himself competing for a $10 million first prize.
Don't tell Daniels about grinding
Doctors have told Daniels he is terminally ill, a sickness he’s endured since his intestines split apart when he was a child. This year, he’s spent months in the hospital. Although he played the Main last year, he had no plans to play this year. The Main is a grind for anyone, but for a guy who struggles to get out of bed on any given day, the prospect of 12-hour days for more than a week–and paying $10,000 for the privilege–was not even something he considered.
Nevertheless, Daniels decided to try to play the small buy-in WSOP Colossus. The days were more manageable, and the race wasn’t as long. The Main? Maybe…hopefully next year?
That’s when a man named Mr. Keating came along.
"The most generous thing ever"
Alan Keating, a guy some folks would describe kindly as an eccentric high roller, seemed to have several epiphanies this summer. A couple of days before Cody Daniels sat with an IV in a vein, Keating sent out a social media post.
“It’s been overwhelming for me to receive the kindness I have from the different people I’ve met this summer in Vegas,” Keating said. “This crazy game we all play has always been and will always be about the people. That’s you. That’s us. And our community.”
In the middle of all of that, Keating found Daniels and made him an offer. It was the kind of offer almost no one could refuse, but everyone would have forgiven Daniels if he had.
Keating offered to put Daniels in the Main Event.
"It was just the most generous thing ever," Daniels said.
Daniels taking his pick
What do you do if you’re Cody Daniels? You could beg off and go to bed. You could take the offer and suffer through a couple of days and then fall short of the money and feel worse for the effort. Or maybe you could do something else.
Someone told Daniels he should pack it in and protect his health. Daniels thought about it and responded, “I either feel like shit in bed or out of bed. So I take my pick.”
And that is how Daniels–a man who can’t say how long it will be before he needs a nurse again, how long he’ll able to grind, or how long he’ll even be around to play anything–found himself in the money today in the biggest poker tournament in the world.
There is no ending to this story, and no one dares try to imagine one. For Daniels, Keating, and everyone watching at a distance, it’s only about this moment and the gratitude that comes with it.
That is life as Cody Daniels knows it today. He’ll figure out tomorrow when it comes.
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PokerOrg’s Alex Loveless interviewed Daniels in the PokerOrg lounge this week. You can watch that below. Cody is still in the Main Event at the time of publishing this story, with a stack of 375,000.
