ShareThe 2023 World Series of Poker is now over but it’s a given that many of the participants have gone home and are still dealing with a great deal of emotional turnover, good or bad.
For almost three months, poker players from all over the world make the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas having their dreams made or shattered in equal measure. And so, it stands to reason that around this time every year we have a collection of hands that showcase some of these moments. Here’s two that stood out in the last couple of weeks of the series.
Heartbreak in the Main Event
The following hand changed the course of poker history. It’s not very often that you will see a multi-way all-in where everyone has a premium hand but that’s what happened here. Right in front of the cameras on the TV table, WSOP Main Event winner Daniel Weinman was up against a tough decision that was about to massively change his life.Josh Payne raises it up with pocket kings and Jose Aguilera three-bets his queens on the button. All standard enough. But then Weinman wakes up in the small blind with jacks. What can he do at this stage of the game?
Aguilera has both players covered so it’s make or break time for Weinman. But he is also still wielding a stack of more than 35 big blinds which is plenty big enough to play proper poker with for some time.
Aguilera can easily be using his big stack to put pressure on Payne here. It’s not a slam dunk shove for pocket jacks by any means.
But after a few minutes of pondering, Daniel Weinman does indeed shove his chips in with both of his opponents following suit. That said, Jose Aguilera was far from happy about this but he couldn’t see another way forward.
The flop came down 4s Ah 7h, missing all three players. But when the turn is flipped over the rail goes nuts seeing that it is a jack, giving the worst hand a 90% chance of the win.
The river was a complete miss again and Daniel Weinman was set up for what would be the tournament of his life.
But spare a thought for the heartbreak of Josh Payne who went to the turn with 83% equity.
Idan the One Struck by Lightning Twice
One player who really did have his heart ripped out in the 2023 WSOP Main Event was a young Israeli known as Idan The One. He was one of the eager players who jumped straight into the opening Day 1 flight and soon wished he hadn’t bothered.This was because not once, but twice, Idan found himself in the envious position of getting his pocket aces all in preflop against pocket kings, only to get coolered both times.
