Double WCOOP champ scores big in PokerGO Studio side quest

Gruffudd Pugh-Jones entered the final day of Event #7 at the PokerGO Tour PLO Series II as a relatively unknown player with just over $150K in live earnings to his name. He originally came to Las Vegas to pick up a WSOP payout from this summer with a plan to play a little bit of PLO on the side — now he will leave with over $200K.

The Welshman had already cashed in Event #6 — a $10K buy-in where a 10th-place finish earned $31,200 — and the Day 2 appearance guaranteed at least $52,800. 

Pugh-Jones worked the Day 1 chip lead to a second-place finish at a final table that included PLO stalwarts like Nick Schulman, Samuli Sipila, Artem Maksimov, Alex Foxen, and eventual winner Jeremy Ausmus. The $187K score more than doubled his career winnings on The Hendon Mob and introduced him to the world as one of the new faces to be accounted for on the four-card scene. 

“It’s definitely a different ball game,” Pugh-Jones told PokerOrg in a chat before Day 2 started. “But I feel somewhat unknown compared to the superstars here. So you can kind of go under the radar a little bit.”

Letting it ride

Pugh-Jones is anything but under the radar in the online streets after a world-beating World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), where he won both the $10,300 and the $1,050 versions of the PLO World Championship on the same night for a total tally of over $257K.

But it wasn’t the fresh bankroll that inspired a trip to Las Vegas to play against the best. Pugh-Jones had to visit anyway and he figured that he may as well do so when the PLO Series was on.

“I had to pick up one of the cashes from the World Series of Poker because of the tax number issue. I saw this event on, so I made it like a plan to come at this time.”

He finished fourth in an Aria High Roller in June before enjoying a min-cash in the $25K PLO High Roller at the WSOP — the one he had to pick up this week. It was a good time to plan a trip for some shot-taking at the PokerGO Studios, where Pugh-Jones played earlier in the year. “I enjoyed the setup in here. And I saw they ran some big ones last year so I just wanted to get involved.”

Pugh-Jones plays a majority of his poker online — mostly heads-up and Six Max cash games. He spends much of the rest of his time on his bike. 

“I love cycling, so most mornings I’m cycling and then I’ll come back and then get a coffee and then play and study the rest of the day.”

Playing the live game at a high level is an adjustment, not unlike the endurance required for cycling — if not tougher.

“In cycling, you really have to suffer and dig deep and your endurance is tested to the max. Whereas in  poker it’s the mental resilience that gets tested. Here I find it actually very tough. We were playing until midnight or something, we stopped and then you have to get back, sleep, get up, and then come here at 12 pm.

‘You can’t leave much thought to it’

“It definitely takes its toll when you’re playing day after day. It gives you some more respect for the resilience of the players that play for six weeks straight like this. I don’t know how actually.“

It doesn’t help that one needs to conquer players like Schulman, Sipila, and Ausmus under the TV lights at the PokerGO Studios. “Everyone’s playing quite tough. Yesterday we played down to six and it was quite tense actually, you could feel that there was not much chatting going on. So it was definitely quite a nervous environment I think.”

It’s always a tough final table at the PokerGO Studios.

Nerves and fatigue can be a killer when you’re playing against the best in the world, but Pugh-Jones wasn’t pressed on Day 2 with a razor-thin chip lead and a short final table. He settled for a second-place finish after Ausmus caught most of the endgame luck. 

“It’s one pot here or there that gives you an advantage. It’s really down to such fine margins. You can’t leave too much thought to it at the same time. Obviously, you want to play that spot perfectly, but it’s one spot. It’s quite tough to then dissociate after it and be like, oh, did I play well? I didn’t win. It seems there’s a failure or something, but it can just be one single pot that went the wrong way and that’s how it goes sometimes in poker, right?“

^{Photos courtesy of Antonio Abrego/PokerGO}