Scott Ball's Day 2 action in Event #7 of the WSOP Online 2022 Event #7, Million Dollar Mystery Bounty, turned out to be one of those days... in the best sort of ways, though he didn't even recognize it as it occurred. Ball collected the event's top bounty, the million-dollar prize, just a short while into Day 2 play, but misread the award announcement he received, thinking he'd won one of many $1,000 min-pay bounties instead.
Bell had to be told by others that he'd actually won the big prize. At first, WSOP.com posted on Twitter that the $1 million mystery bounty had been claimed in the day's first minutes:
It took a few moments for someone to connect the "ItsRumcake" account to Ball. Kevin Rob Martin, another of the event's participants, posted on Twitter, "OMG. Minutes into day 2 the Million is already gone on @GGPoker mystery bounty. is that @EndGameScott ???" Martin also posted the image of bounties already awarded, which showed Ball's ItsRumcake account as having collected the top $1 million payout:
Sure enough, it was a huge hit for Ball, best known in poker as a double-bracelet winner in the 2021 WSOP and the champion of that year's VELO NO LIMITS leaderboard race, a one-time bonus that included only that year's no-limit events.
On Tuesday, though, Ball was unaware of his extraordinary good fortune. Ball, an early Twitch poker enthusiast and a long-time official "friend" of Americas Cardroom, has to be notified by ACR head Phil Nagy that he'd actually won a million dollars, instead of a thousand:
Though it won't be recorded in any official poker results databases, Ball's million-dollar lottery draw stands as the largest prize he's won in poker to date. It's nearly double the $562,667 he earned as the winner of the 2021 WSOP NLH 6-Max event, his largest recorded tournament cash, and more than both of his bracelet-victory cashes -- his largest two live scores -- combined.
Ball's unexpectedly lucky moment had several commenters bringing up self-avowed luckbox Matt Glantz, who won the $1 top bounty in the WSOP's live mystery bounty tourney last July. Like Ball's stroke of great fortune, Glantz's big prize included its own unusual twist, in that Glantz hadn't even planned on playing that live event but was talked into it that the last minute.
Featured image source: Haley Hintze
