As the WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas gets ready for Day 4 action on Saturday, there are still 11 players who have already had their name engraved on the Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup in contention for the $4.1 million first place prize and another championship.
As the decisions become more important and any missteps potentially costing millions of dollars, having been able to not only get deep in a World Poker Tour event, but win one could prove to be invaluable experience against the rest of the field.
“It helps to kind of understand navigating through the field. There’s a lot of great players left, there’s a lot of great players left that have made deep runs at WPT events and World Series events before,” said David Baker, who won the WPT L.A. Poker Classic in 2019 “Just navigating through large fields and long tournaments, I’ve done that before a few times – obviously the one I won – and some others. That helps for sure.”
The other 10 former WPT champions still in contention are Anthony Gregg, Asher Conniff, Daniel Negreanu, James Carroll, Justin Young, Markus Gonsalves, Mike Del Vecchio, Pat Lyons, Scott Margereson, and Soheb Porbandarwala.
For Conniff, who won the WPT World Championship in 2015, the experience means his nerves may not be as frazzled as some of the lesser experienced players still playing for life-changing money.
“I think it’s a little sense of calm, just knowing you’ve been there before, but this thing is ridiculous. There’s more than $4 million up top, I won less than a million when I won – which is still a ton obviously, but this is a whole different level. So it’ll definitely be nerve-wracking at the end,” said Conniff, who also had a deep run in the 2022 World Series of Poker Main Event, finishing in 10th.
The overall chip leader is Benny Glaser, who finished with 7,565,000. The English mixed game specialist has four World Series of Poker bracelets to his name, but has never won a major No Limit Hold’em title. The only other player to bag more than 7 million chips was Lucas Foster, who finished with 7,095,000.
While female players traditionally make up between 3-5% of big buy-in No Limit Hold’em fields, there are nine women (7%) still in the field. LoriAnne Persinger holds the biggest stack amongst the group with 3,055,000. Not far behind her is Kyna England with 2,030,000. England has WPT final table experience thanks to her third place finish in the WPT Venetian stop in July 2021.
WPT anchor Lynn Gilmartin finished with 650,000 chips while two-time Global Poker Index Female Player of the Year Kristen Foxen is one of the shortest stacks coming back to play with 405,000. Other women still in the field are Arden Cho, Baebae Liu, Julie Dang, Marle Spragg, and Rania Nasreddine.
Some of the notables still among the 128 players still alive include Steve Gross, WPT ambassador Brad Owen, Jeff Madsen, Johan Guilbert, Aaron Massey, PokerGO owner Cary Katz, and Kane Kalas.
Action resumes at Noon PT with featured tables livestreaming on the WPT YouTube channel throughout the day.