- All the action from the weekend’s play at the WSOP.
Chad Brown—An Honorary Bracelet for an Honorable Man
On announcing that the World Series of Poker was awarding Chad Brown an honorary bracelet, tournament director Jack Effel could not keep the emotion from breaking through.
PokerStars Team Pro, and regular on the live tournament circuit for over 20 years, Chad has been fighting a rare form of cancer. He is now in a hospice where he is being made comfortable with a range of medical and holistic therapies.
Effel told the quiet audience that “it now seems a certainty that Chad will never again play in the World Series of Poker.”
He paid tribute to Chad for his integrity, his friendship and the contribution he has made to the game and players during his career. “With a third, and two second place finishes, we know that it would only be a matter of time before we would be handing you this,” Effel announced.
Event #49: $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em
{il:news/miscikowski-bracelet.jpg::medium-right} David “DonkCommitted” Miscikowski took an extra day and over five hours of heads up play before he claimed his first WSOP bracelet and $719k in prize money.
Norbert Szecsi won his first bracelet last year in a $1k event—his disappointment at coming second will be tempered by his winnings of $444k, almost $100k more than he took home for winning his bracelet.
2010 Main Event final tabler John Dolan managed an 8th place finish, Kevin “ImaLuckSac” MacPhee kept it going until 6th place, but both were surpassed by Margareta Morris who kept an early chip lead going as far as fourth.
Event #50: $1,500 Eight Game Mix
{il:news/ivey-bracelet-10.jpg::medium-left} Phil Ivey won his tenth WSOP bracelet over the weekend to pull into a three-way tie for second place on the all-time bracelet list with the legendary Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan.
Ivey won $167,332 in prize money and another untold—presumably much larger—amount from players that bet against either Ivey or Daniel Negreanu winning a bracelet at the 2014 WSOP.
Phil Hellmuth currently holds the most WSOP bracelets with 13.
Event #51: $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em MONSTER STACK (15,000 starting chips)
The 7,862 players who entered the Monster Stack event have taken four long days to get down to the final nine who will return today to decide who will wear the bracelet.
Swiss player Hugo Pinray is set to make a substantial increase in his lifetime tournament winnings of $45k, and will be hoping his chip lead can last until the very end and a first prize of $1.3 million.
Thayer “THAY3R” Rasmussen has third place chips, and with 22 cashes in WSOP events added to over $6 million in online tournament winnings, is looking for that elusive bracelet.
Second placed Sean Drake may only have recorded $96k in tournament winnings, but he has what Rasmussen is dreaming of—a WSOP bracelet. Drake won the 2011 Event #1: $500 Casino Employees No-Limit Hold’em.
Event #52: $10,000 Limit Hold’em
{il:news/olson-bracelet.jpg::medium-right}The second small field event of the weekend also produced a first time bracelet winner as David Olson took down the $10k Limit championship.
Entering was a last minute affair, Olson told reporters after his victory. “I wasn’t going to play this,” said Olson, “but my friends talked me into it. I’m glad I did. It was a last minute thing.”
To take the championship, Olson had to get through a final table that wasn’t short on talent. Two time bracelet winner Bill Chen went out in 6th, Norwegian Jan Slavic finished in 8th.
Former Russian chess player Mikhail Tulchinskiy took Olson down the home stretch in a heads up battle that lasted over two hours with the lead swapping several times. Phil Hellmuth’s favorite hand, 9-9 ended it all for Tulchinskiy who took home $187k—Olson’s last minute decision paid out $303k.
Event #53: $10,000 Ladies No-Limit Hold’em Championship
{il:news/zhang-bracelet.jpg::medium-left} Haixia Zhang emerged from a field of 793 to take the Ladies Championship event. Her $153k winnings dwarfed her previous total lifetime live tournament earnings of $25k.
Men are allowed to enter the event, but women receive a 90% discount on the $10k buy in, hence the total prize pool of $713k.
Mikiyo Aoki, an architect from Montana, took second place after a shortstack shove with J-7 suited was called by Zhang’s A-6 and failed to improve.
“I’m in complete awe, and it’s unreal,” Zhang said in an interview with PokerNews, “It’s surreal. … I have to say, luck was on my side.”
Event #54: $3,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Low Split-8 or Better
{il:news/langmann-bracelet.jpg::medium-right} Cash game player and RunitOnce coach, Zach Freeman went into the heads up phase of Event #54 with a big chip deficit—3.2m chips to 1m.
Sadly, there was no miracle recovery, the bracelet went to experienced live tournament pro Florian Langmann for whom the victory provided a first WSOP bracelet.
It was also his first win in a major event despite having over $2 million in live tournament winnings. Unusually for this year’s series, none of the players at the final table had won a WSOP bracelet before.
The German Langmann won just under $300k for first, while Freeman took home $184k.
Other events still running
Event #55: $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em
$582k will go to the winner of this $1,500 event after 2,396 players entered to swell the prize pool to more than $3.2 million.
David Jackson has the largest chip stack of the remaining 17 players.
Event #56: $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em
Late registration created a record field of 2,525 nearly 700 players more than entered last year’s event. The winner will pick up over $400k.
Day 1 took the field rapidly down to 206, with the current chip leader being Raymond Chen.
Vinny Pahuja has the fourth largest stack as he tries to better the 7th place finish—the best of his five cashes in the series so far—which was in Event #33 also a $1k Sunday No Limit Hold’em tournament.
Event #57: The Big One for One Drop
Sam Trickett leads the event at the end of Day 1. The 42 players who put up a million dollars each to play the event are down to 31 with $15 million going to the winner.
