The WSOP $10,000 Main Event Day 7 has been completed and play at Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino has wrapped up or at least for the summer. There are still nine players in contention for the top prize of $8 million and the gold bracelet hand-crafted exclusively for this year’s Main Event champion. The finalists are set to return at the host venue on October 30 and to participate in the official final table festivities.
As it has been since 2008, the WSOP Main Event final table is played over three days early in November. As mentioned above, this year, the nine survivors will return at Rio on October 30, which means that the name of the champion will likely become clear on November 1, if everything goes as planned.
There were 27 players to be seated at the Amazon room poker tables at the beginning of Day 7. The remaining hopefuls were led by Czech poker pro Vojtech Ruzicka with 26,415,000. The names of the nine finalists became clear after ten hours of play, during which chips swung back and forth and different players emerged as chip leaders at various stages of play.
Eventually, Cliff ‘JohnnyBax’ Josephy took the lead and will return at Rio this fall holding a total of 74,600,000. It could be said with no exaggeration that Josephy is the most popular and most accomplished player among all nine finalists. He is the holder of two WSOP gold bracelets and is known to be among online poker’s “original heroes.”
Josephy won his first WSOP-related gold piece in 2005 when he bested the field of the $1,500 Seven-Card Stud event. Bracelet number two came in 2013 when the player won the $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout. As for his accomplishments online, Josephy has topped online rankings for several times since he began playing poker more than a decade ago.
Here it is important to note that the player is also the one to have won the most from various WSOP tournaments among all nine finalists. His WSOP winnings amount to $810,358 and he has cashed in 17 Series tournaments over the years.
This year’s Main Event final table boasts international presence. There are five US players, a Belgian, a Czech, a Canadian, and a Spaniard among the November Niners. Some of them have a number of previous WSOP in-the-money finishes but no one has ever won a gold bracelet, aside from Josephy. Here are the names of all nine survivors and their respective chip counts:
Cliff Josephy (USA) – 74,600,000
Qui Nguyen (USA) – 67,925,000
Gordon Vayo (USA) – 49,375,000
Kenny Hallaert (Belgium) – 43,325,000
Michael Ruane (USA) – 31,600,000
Vojtech Ruzicka (Czech Republic) – 27,300,000
Griffin Benger (Canada) – 26,175,000
Jerry Wong (USA) – 10,175,000
Fernando Pons (Spain) – 6,150,000
