Lara Eisenberg has achieved a lot of impressive things in her life. She holds a world record in skydiving, having taken part in a 400-person formation that came together in the skies over Thailand in 2006. The Radiologist from Silver Springs, MD added to her unique collection of achievements by winning the 2021 World Series of Poker $1,000 buy-in Ladies no-limit hold’em championship on Thursday, earning her first gold bracelet and the top prize of $115,694. This was the largest tournament score on her resume, surpassing the $28,199 she earned along with her first WSOP Circuit gold ring by taking down a $1,125 buy-in event at the 2019 WSOPC Horseshoe Council Bluffs. The win increased her poker earnings to $255,047. Eisenberg came into the final day of this event as the short stack, with 24 big blinds to play with when the remaining five players took their seats. Women in Poker Hall of Fame member Joanne ‘JJ’ Liu was the first to fall. She got all-in on the turn with top pair and a
Nate Silver was thrust into the public eye when his U.S. Presidential election model correctly predicted the outcomes in all but one of the 50 states in 2008. The founder and editor-in-chief of data-driven politics and sports website FiveThirtyEight was named one of Time’s ’World’s 100 Most Influential People’ in 2009 and released a New York Times bestselling non-fiction book in 2012. Before Silver built a media empire, however, there was a time when he was a professional poker player. His time grinding the game for a living came to an end a couple of years prior to his rise to prominence in the political sphere. In recent years, the Michigan native has managed to take some time to revisit the poker world. He has played in a number of live poker tournaments, securing nine cashes between the summers of 2018 and 2021. Silver’s largest score had been a fifth-place finish in a $600 buy-in no-limit hold ’em event at the Venetian DeepStack Championship Poker Series for $22,737. B
In just 16 hours of poker, Michael Perrone turned $1,000 into $152,173 and a World Series of Poker bracelet. The New York native bested a 1,640-entry field in the $1,000 super turbo bounty no-limit hold’em to earn his first bracelet, the six-figure score and however many $300 bounties he picked up along the way. With the super turbo structure, blinds were raised every 20 minutes, allowing the large field to play to a winner in just one day. It’s the continuation of a strong 2021 for Perrone, who final tabled the $3,500 World Poker Tour main event at Choctaw last July, finishing sixth for $118,090. At the time, the score in Oklahoma was the largest cash of Perrone’s career before he topped it in the early hours of Wednesday morning. According to the official WSOP updates, playing this event wasn’t even in his schedule. He needed a nudge from a friend to enter. “I wasn’t even going to play this event,” Perrone told WSOP reporters after the event. “I was going to go to the
The 2021 World Series of Poker Online $5,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em main event drew a massive field of 4,092 entries. The $20,000,000 guarantee was just missed, resulting in an overlay for those that took their shot at this huge event. The tournament officially began on Aug. 22, with registration not coming to a close until Sept. 5. The final table was set later that day. After a week-long pause, the final table resumed on Saturday, Sept. 11. In a matter of hours, the final nine were narrowed down to a champion: Aleksei Vandyshev. The Russian player earned $2,543,073 and his first WSOP gold bracelet for the win. This was by far the largest score of Vandyshev’s tournament career. His largest previous cash in an event with full real-name results was his seventh-place finish in the 2016 World Poker tour Borgata Winter Poker Open main event for $132,089. The final day began with Brazil’s Edson Tsutsumi Jr in the lead and Vandyshev sitting in second chip position. It only took a hand
After facing a huge chip deficit four-handed at the final table, Roland ‘Quina Quen’ Czika mounted a massive comeback to earn his first World Series of Poker bracelet. The Hungarian topped the 975-entry field in the WSOP Online International $400 pot-limit Omaha double chance event to earn $55,369 along with the hardware. He defeated China’s Lei ‘A LEI’ Yang heads-up to secure the title. Mike Watson, a high-stakes pro with $12.1 million in live tournament earnings, finished third. Czika started the second and final day of the tournament in the middle of the leaderboard and entered the final table in a similar situation – fourth in chips at the seven-handed final table. Czika was able to accumulate chips, and briefly take over the chip lead, while three players hit the rail over the first couple of levels at the final table. Stanislav ‘shrekpoker’ Halatenko fell in seventh, when he checked flop, bet turn and shoved river with pocket aces on a KQQ52 board. Yang check-call