Shaun Deeb had all but given up on a run at the 2025 WSOP Player of the Year title after a wild start to the series saw Benny Glaser win three bracelets.
“Benny won three bracelets so quickly,” shared Deeb. “I only had two seconds at that point, so I figured POY would be extremely hard to win and pretty much ignored it.”
However, Deeb’s WSOP picked up the pace in the second half just as Glaser’s form was dropping off. And, in an incredible burst at the end, Deeb ended with his second Player of the Year banner in a thrilling race to the tape, despite messed-up scores, some bad advice, and an incredible Main Event win by Michael Mizrachi.
We tracked Deeb down at home in New York to discuss what happened in the final few days of one of the best WSOPs of all time.
When did you realize you had a realistic shot at the POY title after all?
Well, as the summer progressed, Benny just stopped cashing and kept bubbling these big buy-in tournaments that take two or three days. He was going a lot of days without getting any points.
Then you caught fire yourself, in a big way.
I won the $100k PLO event for close to $3 million and then finished second in the $1,000 NLH event. I checked online after that and discovered that the scoring was messed up. After these finishes, I thought I had an even higher lead than I actually had.
Wait, you couldn’t check results properly online? What happened?
WSOP staff told me that the issue was that the online results weren’t being updated and merged with the live points. I think they were so focused on other important updates at the WSOP that the POY stuff was put by the wayside. There wasn’t really anyone in charge of the leaderboard, although I know there were a handful of people who got involved trying to fix it. I think the WSOP was pretty annoyed by it, but I believe it will be fixed for next year.
How did you begin to decipher what the actual points were for yourself, Benny, Martin Kabrhel, and others?
Benny had told me that they were counting 11 of my scores, not 10 like they should have been. Then I knew my total was about 150 points lower than it showed, so he was that much closer to me at the top.
What about Martin Kabrhel’s rise up the leaderboard? That had to be a surprise.
It was. I thought I was really in trouble because Benny still had three to four open scores with two weeks’ worth of events coming up. Then Martin came out of nowhere. There's always this one outlier who has a great summer and is a 1/1000 shot. This year, that was Martin. He usually doesn’t put in much volume and mostly plays the highest stakes. But then he had a couple of top threes, a big win, and a bunch of cashes. In addition, people who didn't understand the scoring thought that The Grinder was going to win after he took down the Main Event.
Was Mizrachi suddenly interested in the POY?
I literally talked to him going into the Main Event four-handed final table. He wanted to jump into an event to get a shot at the POY. I told him to play The Closer. Then he said he wanted to play the $25K HORSE event. That would have been crazy. Mizrachi could have multi-tabled while winning the Main Event, which is something even I, the f*****g craziest multi-tabler, wouldn't have even considered.
I’m sure you were constantly checking the leaderboard and your own calculations at the end.
Of course but something funny happened after everything was done on July 16. Martin called me at two in the morning, and I was very drunk at the time. He wanted to bet me that he was ahead of me in POY points.
What? That had to have you scrambling to recheck the totals.
I started to look at it all over again. I was checking my scores versus Benny's, as that was the biggest concern of mine. Martin told me that a lot of his scores were off, so I started manually calculating all the scores. The first couple I checked were off, but then the fourth one I checked was actually off the opposite way, where he had 50 to 60 more points than he should.
Once I found that, I knew that he was well behind me and Benny. Then there was a clarification regarding multiple cashes in a single event. I felt awful because Benny asked for advice on that. I told him what I believed to be the case and that one tournament was the difference between Benny winning or me.
Can you explain more?
If Benny had cashed in either of those flights and reached 7.5% of the field, rather than the 15% he achieved, he would have won the POY. That is one of the craziest things. People often discuss the issue with the top-heavy nature of the POY points calculation, but they overlook the real flaw, which lies in the bottom half.
What did that mean for your totals?
If I had lost the POY, I would have been really mad with myself. The calculations for points on the lower tier meant I could have stalled or played a little bit tighter and gained points.
But you didn’t.
No. Because I thought POY was such a long shot, and I was playing every event to final table and win bracelets. I was going for the home run. I wasn't trying to chisel away at Benny’s lead because I really thought it was insurmountable. If Benny had even a 5% distribution of normal summer scores after those three wins, he would have definitely won the POY.
Stay tuned for part two, where Shaun shares his thoughts on the POY drama sparked by Phil Hellmuth.
