ShareImage courtesy of PokerGO.com
Michael Noori has won the WSOP Event #30: $1,500 Monster Stack No-Limit Hold'em and picked up his first ever WSOP gold bracelet.
The Californian collected a tidy $610,346 prize and bumped his live tournament record up to more than $1.3 million after besting the 3,520-entry strong field.
Victory Snatched from the Jaws of Defeat
Michael Noori’s victory is as popular as you will see in this series, but at one point we have to say it didn’t look likely for a couple of reasons.First, he lost a couple of pots with some terrible luck and ended up staring down at his last 1.5 big blinds. And, if that wasn't enough his opponent at the heads-up stage was the in-form Ryan Leng coming off a victory of his own only four days previously.
It wasn’t easy by any stretch, but there was a big swing when Noori hit a straight draw on the turn to beat Leng’s two pair. Less than an hour later, it was all over.
In his post-match interview, Noori said: "I feel pretty good, I'm still kind of in shock. The heads-up match went really quick, I'm still processing it and going through it. I had two huge coolers that went my way so I was fortunate enough to win the bracelet today. I think I am better in mixed games, but I had some deep runs in the Monster Stack before. I finished in the top 1 percent in 2017 or 2018. I've been there before but didn't have the crucial flips go my way and on this final table, everything went my way. It's very fortunate and nice to be here."
Final results:
| 1 | Michael Noori | $610,437 |
| 2 | Ryan Leng | $377,220 |
| 3 | Rafael Reis | $288,101 |
| 4 | Christopher Andler | $221,289 |
| 5 | Charlie Dawson | $170,943 |
| 6 | Mordechai Hazan | $132,812 |
| 7 | Daniel Fortier | $103,784 |
| 8 | Johan Schumacher | $81,573 |
| 9 | Anthony Ortega | $64,490 |
| 10 | Jaesh Balachandran | $51,286 |
