With two gold bracelets, four final table appearances and 11 cashes at this year’s World Series of Poker, it is no surprise that Jason Mercier walked away with the coveted WSOP Player of the Year Award.
The accolade comes on the heels of Mercier finishing second in this year’s Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) Overall Leaderboard back in May—cementing the fact that he is both an online and live beast in the poker world.
“I am honored to receive this award,” Mercier said. “There are so many tough players that every year have a great shot of winning this title, and I’m fortunate to have been able to have a successful summer at the tables and come out on top. I played almost every single event of SCOOP in May, which was in hindsight the perfect preparation for a tough summer of poker.”
Mercier’s final table run looked a little something like this:
$10,000 2-7 Draw Lowball Championship – 1st place – $273,335
$10,000 Seven Card Razz Championship – 2nd place – $168,936
$10,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship – 1st place – $422,874
$10,000 Omaha Hi-Low Split-8 or Better – 8th place – $39,269
That’s nearly $1 million in prize winnings—not to mention the prop bets that he was running on the side. We can only imagine Vanessa Selbst is sighing with relief right now.
The Player of the Year Award was a tightly fought race between Mercier and Paul Volpe who could have surpassed Mercier if he had managed to go deeper than his 29th place finish in the Main Event.
Following Mercier winning the award, Daniel Negreanu said, “The Player of the Year race is a very special honor and no one is more deserving than Jason for his accomplishments in 2016. What a run he had playing against the world’s best and consistently putting up results. A great player who is highly skilled in every form of poker. Very happy for him.”
As if all this wasn’t enough to make this the best summer run of his life, Mercier finished his time at the WSOP by proposing to his long time love Natasha Barbour —shortly after she busted out in 3rd place of the $5,000 No Limit Hold’em event—making it a summer to remember for the pair.
