With WSOP Event #34: $500 COLOSSUS, the clue’s in the name.
Not only is the field of players colossally huge, its name is officially spelled in all-caps. Does it get BIGGER than that?
Halfway through Monday’s Day 3 and the 16,269 players who entered are down to just 49. Everyone has locked up $13,200 — already a great return on a $500 investment, but the winner will get $550K.
And right up there as one of the biggest stacks in the field is Brennen 'Ladell' Bryant from Los Angeles; a man with no WSOP cashes to date, but a whole load of chips in front of him.
“I have a full-time job in music, I work in a publishing company,” says Bryant when we catch up on a break in the action. “But then when it comes to poker I guess I’m a semi-professional. I'll probably work 40-50 hours a week and then play poker that amount of time as well. I take this really seriously.”
It shows. Bryant is playing without fear and continuing to stack chips in a tourney where his fellow Day 3 survivors include the likes of bracelet-winners Stephen Song and Eric Baldwin, who’s currently sitting on his left.
The 40-minute levels are flying by, and by the end of Monday the field should be reduced to the final 9. Bryant has every intention of being one of them.
“I'm excited. I think I have a real shot in making the final table and I want to win this tournament. That's what I told myself this morning.
“Whatever happens, happens, but I feel really confident.”
Looking for the breakthrough hit
Bryant spends most of his poker time playing online at Club WPT Gold or live at the Lucky Lady in LA.
This is his second trip to the WSOP; he won a satellite to play his way into the Mini Main Event last year, but fell short of the money.
He tells me he’s been taking poker seriously for two years, having learned as a child.
“My parents taught me when I was younger,” recalls Bryant. “They're both poker players, not professionals or anything, but they taught me to play. My dad’s a teacher, and he used to play during summers — and would make a lot of money, although I didn't know that until later in life!”
What started as a passion for playing has evolved into a love of creating poker content — you can find him on Instagram under the name ‘LadellPoker’— inspired by the many YouTubers he learned so much from. He shouts out Hungry Horse Poker in particular.
“My whole thing is about being authentic,” he explains. “I'm just a normal guy, and this is how I approach the game and my thought process. I don't know exactly every single solver spot, I'm not going to be able to tell you exact answers that are 100% correct, but I'm going to tell you what I think.
“And I think people have gravitated towards that, and they've also seen my climb, because I started with nothing.”
Poker may effectively be Bryant’s second job, but he draws an interesting parallel between success in music and in poker content.
“Most artists start with nothing: nobody knows them, they don't know their music, they don't know anything about them. And then a song blows up, and everyone comes to see what's going on.
“And I feel like that's kind of where my story is right now, because I'm this guy who doesn't have any WSOP cashes, I haven't made any crazy final tables. I don’t have the reputation of some of the other players still in this event, but I feel like I'm building to that.
“And my goal is to become the next Phil Ivey, the next Stephen Song, the next Alex Foxen. I really want to cement myself in WSOP history.”
Number one with a bullet?
The COLOSSUS is the only tournament Bryant has played so far this series. He arrived in Las Vegas on Thursday night, fired one bullet, and here he is.
He tells me that the first two days were largely uneventful — at least as far as the huge hands and big swings seen so often in poker vlogs.
“Days 1 and 2 were really just a lot of standard spots. I think I had a lot of flips that I won, but they weren't anything crazy. I didn't have any monsters: no aces, kings or queens, it was just one pair, two pair, I don't think I even made a flush or a straight until the end of day 2.”
Of course, surviving and thriving when you’re not making big hands is a key element of successful tournament play. Sometimes you’ve got to give the deck a chance to catch up with you, and that’s what happened after a couple of days of patience.
“Today, I looked around the table and realized that I have a real shot. And then the deck finally cooperated with me. I think I flopped four sets, I had aces, I had a straight, I flopped trips, so I just kept building, building, building and there was just a feeling inside of me.”
For your first WSOP cash to be $550K and a gold bracelet is the stuff that dreams are made of.
With one of the biggest stacks in the room heading into the end of Day 3, Bryant is daring to believe.
“My dream was to always run deep at the WSOP. My family's so happy for me and proud of me, regardless of what happens, so I just really want to get this, this is my shot, my opportunity.
“Plus I think it'll make for a pretty good story, too. And I'm always about a good story, you know what I mean?”
Follow Brennen ‘Ladell’ Bryant on Instagram.
Additional image courtesy of the Lucky Lady Casino.
