Amid the crowds, the sound of riffling chips and the huge mix of bracelet events taking place live at the World Series of Poker, it can sometimes be easy to forget that there’s an online component to this festival.
Online WSOP events award bracelets too — as well as big money — and one man who will be celebrating that fact today is the highly regarded player, coach, author, content creator and PokerOrg Player Advisory Board member Jonathan Little (pictured above).
New York-based Little won the online $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em Freezeout event last week for $90,663 and, hard as it may be to believe, his first WSOP bracelet. He collected his hardware in person on Wednesday, to cheers from the assembled crowd of well-wishers.
Congratulations from everyone at PokerOrg — we always knew it was never if, but when.
Ari Engel claims all-time record for most cashes
At the risk of this turning into a love-in, congratulations are also in order for another member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board, Ari Engel.
A player who always seems to be in action, and always making the money, Engel recently tied the record set by ‘Miami’ John Cernuto for most recorded tournament cashes. Wednesday saw Engel take the record outright when he landed in the money in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha 8-Handed event.
Just how much Engel’s 598th cash will ultimately be worth is still up in the air. By the close of play on Day 1 the field of 1,564 entrants was down to just 114, with Engel sitting towards the bottom of the chip counts with around 14 big blinds. He’ll return to take his shot at the $306,791 top prize when play resumes at noon on Thursday. Germany’s Giuseppe Pantaleo has the chip lead heading into Day 2, chasing a second WSOP bracelet.
$1.2M prize awarded in Monster Stack
This year’s $1,500 Monster Stack drew a suitably monstrous field of 9,920 — a significant increase on the 8,703 who took part in 2024 — and drew to a close on Wednesday with the $1,204,457 winner’s prize going to Austria’s Klemens Roiter.
Router started the final day’s play with the second biggest stack of the final seven players — a group which included two-time bracelet winner Dylan Linde. The latter would be the first to fall, suffering a cooler when he picked up pocket kings at the same time Roiter had pocket aces.
Roiter’s day would prove to be a rollercoaster, and heads-up play versus David Uvadov would see him reduced at one point to just 10 big blinds, but he ended up holding all the chips for his first WSOP bracelet win and the largest score of his career.
Another day needed to end Razz duel
The $10,000 Razz Championship was due to crown a winner on Wednesday, but will be back on Thursday to play it out after Brian Rast (below) and Andrew Yeh couldn’t resolve their heads-up battle before the lights went out in the Horseshoe Events Center.
A win for Rast would put the Hall of Famer in the seven-time winners’ club, while Yeh is in pursuit of a second to add to his 2022 victory in the $10,000 HORSE Championship (the latest edition of which happened to kick off on Wednesday — John Hennigan leads the field).
There’s $306,644 up top, and Rast will need to lean on his talent and experience when play resumes, given he ended play on Wednesday at a chip deficit of 3:1.
Brian Yoon and Joao Vieira were the other two players who made it to the four-handed stage, meaning the final four possessed 16 WSOP bracelets between them. Vieira’s run to fourth, for $101,983, was yet another deep run for the Portuguese who now has six cashes, two final tables, one win and almost $3M in earnings from this summer’s WSOP… so far.
