Doyle Brunson won the first of his two Main Event titles at Binion's in 1976.
Twenty-two players paid $10,000 to enter, and it was winner-takes-all, with Doyle beating Jesse Alto with 
to claim the $220,000 prize.
Doyle won the Main Event again the next year, this time beating a field of 34. Over an incredible career, he won 10 WSOP bracelets in all and was christened the Godfather of Poker.
50 years later, his son, Todd Brunson, is making a charge to win it for himself. The fields and the payouts are wildly different, but the bracelet is the same. The remaining 42 players in the 2026 Main Event are currently on dinner break on Day 7 and contemplating the $10 million first prize. A total of 9,166 players have already been eliminated.
Todd has already won a WSOP bracelet, but his single biggest score was for $500,000 in an Invitational event in 2006. His Omaha Hi/Lo bracelet win in 2005 netted him $255,945.
The Brunson legacy
Todd was trying to win the Main Event before he was even old enough to play it.
In an interview with PokerGO, he recounted a story of winning a satellite to play it when he was 19 and again when he was 20, and both times Jack Binion told him he wasn't old enough to play. He even tried a fake ID, but Binion said he was too well known for it to fly.
Todd has run deep in the Main Event before. He finished 13th in 1992, the year that Hamid Dastmalchi won a cool $1 million to go with the bracelet. And he's had deep runs in the big-field modern era, finishing 154th in 2016, when Qui Nguyen came through a field of 6,737 to win the bracelet.
But that's the closest he's come in the past decade. These days, a deep run is hard enough – winning it remains a dream for all but a handful of players. But Todd has a real shot, sitting in the middle of the pack of the remaining 42 players, with a stack of 15 million under the lights of one of the feature tables.
It would have been 23 million shortly before the dinner break if Tolga Karakaya hadn't hit runner-runner to crack his aces. All the chips were in preflop and Karakaya was a huge dog with 
. He had his jacket on after the 
flop, but a king on the turn and a jack on the river gave him the miracle he needed to survive.
Todd's seen it all before and shrugged it off with a wry smile.
Famous faces on the rail
He's got a ton of support. We caught up with Phil Hellmuth on the rail, and he told us, "He's burnishing the legacy of his father, it's amazing. Todd has always been a great player. The poker world knows he's a great player and now he's got the chance to show it."
We spoke with Todd and asked him how it felt to be going deep now compared to 1992 and he said, "It's really exciting. Even more so now than it was back then."
If he can navigate his way through to the final nine on Monday night, and with ESPN set to broadcast the final table live August 3-5, the Brunson story will take another remarkable turn. One that Doyle would have loved to have seen.
