At the 56th annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada this summer, the poker world has witnessed what is perhaps the greatest single-year performance of any player in the event series’ history.
44-year-old professional poker player Michael ‘the Grinder’ Mizrachi from Palm Beach, Florida won the two most prestigious events this year, the $50,000 buy-in Poker Players Championship and the $10,000 buy-in Main Event.
The PPC features 9 different game types, while the Main Event is a freezeout tournament in the most commonly played poker game, No Limit Texas Hold’em. The former event draws more elite competition because of the higher buy-in and its mixed game nature; the latter is a tremendously difficult event to win because of its massive field size—this year, 9,735 players entered.
Mizrachi took down the Poker Players Championship on 28 June, winning $1.331 million in prize money. To make it even more impressive, this was the fourth (!) time he won this event, after 2010, 2012, and 2018.
However, the event in the series that gets the most media attention every year is the WSOP Main Event.
This time, the audience even got a villain to root against: British card player William Kassouf drew the ire of his fellow players at the table and the viewers alike for his incessant, often aggressive talking and slow decision-making. This resulted in a ban for him from all WSOP events until the end of the year.
The hero of the story, however, was undoubtedly Mizrachi. Despite being down to just three big blinds on Day 8, he managed to climb—or rather, in his case, ‘grind’—back on top. He entered the final two, the so-called ‘heads-up’ phase, of the tournament on Wednesday, 16 July against John Wasnock with a massive, over 5:1 chiplead.
From there, it was a quick resolution: after only about half an hour of heads-up play, Mizrachi managed to beat Wasnock for poker’s most coveted title. In the final hand, Mizrachi turned a flush against his opponent’s top two pair, so getting all the chips in the middle was not complicated. The new world champion of poker pocketed $10 million in prize money.
This was the 8th WSOP gold bracelet in Michael Mizrachi’s career.
To commemorate his one-of-a-kind summer, members of the Poker Hall of Fame unanimously voted to make him a special addition to the honour club, despite having picked their annual new member addition for the year already.
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