The World Series of Poker Main Event had a record number of entrants this year, 10,112.
Now, it’s down to the Final Table of nine players.
The winner will take home $10 million and the WSOP Main Event gold bracelet. For a pursuit dominated by men (no Main Event has ever had even 5% participation by women, as far as we know), poker players are really, really into jewelry.
Each of the nine players you’ve never heard of is guaranteed at least $1 million for getting this far.
It costs $10,000 to enter the Main Event, one of many tournaments within the World Series of Poker, played at Horseshoe and Paris.
The Main Event prize pool was more than $94 million. The top 1,517 players win money.
The final nine are Jordan Griff, Brian Kim, Niklas Astedt, Joe Serock, Jason Sagle, Boris Angelov, Jonathan Tamayo, Malo Latinois and Andres Gonzalez.
The players are from the U.S., Sweden, Canada, Bulgaria and Spain.
You can find out about all the players here.
The Final Table will be livestreamed on PokerGO, whatever that might be. Watching live poker is akin to watching paint dry, so just skip it and we’ll update this story when there’s a winner.
It’s telling the final nine of the WSOP Main Event doesn’t include names like Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey or Phil Hellmuth. That’s because while there’s some skill involved with poker, there’s also a metric hell-ton of luck required.
We haven’t played much live poker, but one time when we did, we had a very lucky streak and were nearly pummeled to death by longtime players who were not amused by our beating them handily despite our obvious inexperience.
One of the great things about the WSOP Main Event is pretty much anyone can win. It’s not dominated by poker superstars, which keeps dreams of million-dollar prizes alive.
Oh, and bracelets! This year’s winner’s bling is made of “445 grams of 10-karat yellow gold with 2,253 various precious gemstones, including 1,948 round genuine diamonds, 230 black onyx stones and 75 genuine red rubies to accentuate the suits.” Learn more at the WSOP Web site.
The closure of Mirage on July 17 is going to swallow up the news about who wins the WSOP Main Event, but check back for who prevails.