Ole Schemion is a well-respected poker professional with over $16 million in documented live tournament earnings on his resume before the age of 30. Despite his overall success in poker tournaments around the world, Schemion hasn’t played in very many WSOP events to date, with only seven live tournament cashes and eight online tournament cashes under the WSOP brand before this event. Schemion made this eighth live cash in a WSOP event a memorable one, as he won the Event #79 $1979 Poker Hall of Fame Bounty tournament on Friday for his first WSOP gold bracelet and the tournament’s top prize of $172,499.
Celebrating the Poker Hall of Fame
This tournament’s odd buy-in amount of $1,979 was designed to honor the year 1979, in which Benny Binion founded the Poker Hall of Fame. As a unique twist, to celebrate members of the Poker Hall of Fame that are still active today, every current Hall-of-Famer that entered had a bounty on their head equal to the year that they were inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame.
The event drew 11 members of the Poker Hall of Fame, who each had the following bounties on their heads corresponding to the year that they entered the hall:
- Doyle Brunson ($1,988)
- Lyle Berman ($2,002)
- Barbara Enright ($2,007)
- Phil Hellmuth ($2,007)
- Barry Greenstein ($2,011)
- Linda Johnson ($2,011)
- Tom McEvoy ($2,013)
- Scotty Nguyen ($2,013)
- Jack McClelland ($2,014)
- Daniel Negreanu ($2,014)
- Eli Elezra ($2,021)
Vince Vaughn, who was recently announced as the “Master of Ceremonies” for the 2022 World Series of Poker, also entered the tournament with a bounty on his head. Vaughn and all 11 of these Hall of Fame entrants were eliminated on the first day of this three-day tournament.
Smooth sailing for Schemion
Event #79 had a total of 469 players, generating a prize pool of $826,050. The field was narrowed down to 63 players at the end of Day 1 and to just six players prior to the start of Day 3. Marc Rivera (721,000 chips) and Jerry Wong (700,000 chips) were the chip leaders at the end of Day 1, but by the end of Day 2, Ole Schemion had built up a huge lead over the rest of the field. Schemion’s six-handed final table starting stack of 6,905,000 represented just under half of the 14,085,000 total chips in play.
Schemion rode his massive stack to a fairly easy victory on Day 3. The German pro scored all but one of the five knockouts at the final table and entered heads-up play with a 12.4 million to 1.7 million chip advantage over Benjamin Underwood. Heads up took only a few hands to complete, and Schemion went from final table chip leader to WSOP bracelet winner in just two hours of play.
Day 3 Final Table Payouts
1. Ole Schemion: $172,499
2. Benjamin Underwood: $106,618
3. Giovani Torre: $74,175
4. Marc Rivera: $52,569
5. James Alexander: $37,965
6. Jerry Wong: $27,951
Featured Image Credit: PokerGO
