An ecstatic Ryan Hoenig celebrated his first bracelet win in the $10K Dealers Choice 6-Handed Championship like it was 1999 (approximately when he’d have discovered mixed games as a teenager). Omaha hi-lo first opened his eyes to the possibilities outside of two-card poker and now he says he ‘feels like a kid’ every time he plays them.
This kid now has over a million dollars in tournament winnings, including the $354,444 that came along with his first WSOP bracelet. He warmed up for this win with a couple of cashes last week (in the $1,500 2-7 Single Draw Lowball and $1,500 Dealers Choice) but there’s nothing like claiming that jewelry, and his delight – both in his performance and in the experience – was clear to anyone watching him claim the title.
The claiming had to wait for one of those unscheduled Day 4 restarts (three-handed vs. Dylan Smith and Philip Sternheimer), after a 152-entry field took a little longer than planned to eat itself. The final had already lost Brandon Cantu, Matthew Vengrin and Dario Alioto (in that order) and it was Smith who eventually took the runner-up spot and $230,374.
Hoenig was chip leader at the end of Day 1 and bagged the top stack on every following day. This can’t have hurt his confidence which was already, it appears, fairly solid, given his helpful heads up on social media back at the start of May that he has decided to climb the pinnacle of mixed game events, the $50K Poker Players Championship.
Lavin life
Who wouldn’t be loving it when a first (live) WSOP bracelet and $267,373 payout is accompanied by a $1 million bonus from the Gold Rush Promotion on ClubWPT Gold?
This is the true story of Michael Lavin’s win in the $1,500 Shootout (Event #20), told in eye-opening detail here on PokerOrg. Lavin turned $0 into $1,000,000 by winning one of 11 designated WSOP events after taking down a 2,800-runner freeroll – already quite a feat.
Lavin noted that the gear change the shootout format requires from winner-takes-all in the first rounds was a brain-scrambler: “It made the whole tournament so weird for me.”
He navigated the final table in steamroller form, however, busting everyone apart from Drew O’Connell, so even though there were ‘uncomfortable’ elements to his shootout experience, they didn’t stop him flattening the opposition. That opposition included Jason Wheeler (6th), Punnat Punsri (3rd) and final roadblock to victory Michael Rossitto, who picked up $178,240.
Lavin, who has 17 online WSOP Circuit rings and one online bracelet, was cheered on by the East Coast poker community in general, and a trio of on-the-rail supporters in particular: Michael Bohmerwald, Stanton Tentnowski and Deon Smith.
“It’s very difficult to be happy with poker when you play professionally. You lose a lot. To win feels f***ing awesome,” he said, as he picked up the cake of the WSOP title and its million dollar icing.
Friedman-Heimiller-Negreanu 1-2-3 in Stud
Another $10K Championship, another heavy bag for Daniel Negreanu. Fresh from his runner up finish in the $10K Limit Omaha Championship a week ago, the spirit of ‘try, try again’ lives on in the Canadian, who currently lies in third for Day 2 of the 100-entry $10K Seven Card Stud Championship.
Comfortably out in front, however, is mixed game phenom Adam Friedman, who already has a bracelet in this event. Oh, and three $10K Dealers Choice ones, won in consecutive years. It’s hard to imagine a tougher top stack to challenge, and the field overall is as stacked as they come.
Last year’s winner James Obst and prior champions Anthony Zinno and Brian Yoon are still in the running, and top ten stacks are in the hands of Per Hildebrand, Dylan Weisman and Bryce Yockey. Only a handful of the 46 remaining competitors do not already own at least one WSOP bracelet; just throwing darts at the chip counts brings up names like Jeremy Ausmus, Gus Hansen, Yuval Bronshtein and Yuri Dzivielevski. This is one to watch.
Day 2 is the new Day 1: bumper last-minute reg boosts $25K High Roller
The 6-handed $25K High Roller has already started handing out chunks of its $7,896,000 prize pool, with the chips of 336 entrants now in the stacks of just 15 players. Any event marked with the ‘HR’ inevitably attracts poker’s elite, studding the queue for Day 2 payouts with the likes of Andrew Lichtenberger (49th), Joao Vieira (41st), Brian Rast (22nd), and Nick Schulman (18th).
Leading the chip counts is Lithuanian Paulius Vaitiekunas, whose $4.8 million in live winnings have mostly been amassed in the ultra-high-rolling Triton series over the last two years; this is just another day at the nosebleed stakes office.
Closest behind him is Jared Bleznick, with Chris Moorman, Galen Hall, David Peters and Kristen Foxen still in the running, guaranteed at least $87,971 in prize money. Of course, the $1,734,717 first prize is the goal for Day 3, with play restarting at noon local time.
Anyone taking an early bath will have the opportunity to jump into a fresh $25K High Roller (Event #26) which kicks off at the same time. This ‘jumping in’ may not be immediate, however. Day 2 brought in 64 entries, most of them so close to the cut-off time that it delayed seating. Cometh the eleventh hour, cometh the high roller.
