Jonathan Tamayo became the champion of the main tournament.
He started the final table with the 7th stack, and in the top 10, he folded his pocket queens preflop.
The bracelet was presented to Jonathan by one of his closest friends, 2015 World Champion Joe McKeehen.
Joe and Jonathan met 14 years ago when they were both just starting to play poker and were roommates at the World Series.
Not real life. My roommate’s picture is right there from 2015. We both have banners now. What in the world just happened?
Leading up to it, Joe was just like, play your game. I realized you’re never going to play perfect poker, and weird things happen, and it’s just unreal.
One of the most talked about events of the last day was the behavior of Tamayo's support group during important hands.
Dominik Nitsche was constantly studying something very carefully on his laptop.
"Should this be allowed at a main event final table?" – asks the author of one of the most popular threads on Reddit in recent days. "Dominik Nitsche and Joe Mckeehen live coaching / showing Tamayo something on a laptop in between hands. Whether solver outputs or past hands it leaves a weird feeling …. Bad look IMO."
In the comments, everyone harshly criticized the actions of Tamayo's team and wondered why the organizers allowed this, especially against the backdrop of the declared war on solvers at the beginning of the series.
“Absolutely sucks and can’t be allowed,” Sam Grafton said surely.
"Assuming the video is accurate, I'd go one step further and would say absolutely sucks," Sam Greenwood agreed, "and a failure by the floor that he wasn't penalized immediately."
"what is going on with the laptop?" – Nietzsche was asked on Twitter. "Sims or hand replays?"
“Simplified sims,” Dominic answered honestly. “It's a competitive game. Not too different from coaches chatting to players in game and giving short instructions whenever there's a break.”
The best part of having a piece win the main is definitely the money. But the 2nd best part is how mad the biggest dipshits on twitter get when they see someone using a laptop on the rail. pic.twitter.com/i2NQkWy9el
— Dominik Nitsche (@DominikNitsche) July 18, 2024
Overall favorite Niklas Astedt entered the final day as the chip leader but was knocked out in 3rd place early on.
Griff 3-bet, continuation bet the flop and shoved the turn. Niklas thought for a long time, but eventually made the call.
Heads-Up play has officially been reached at the @WSOP Main Event Final Table!
— PokerGO (@PokerGO) July 17, 2024
Who will win it all? 👀
📺: https://t.co/s5mI1gdqOt pic.twitter.com/YMpjkkf4Kp
Ostedt, in an interview immediately after his elimination, also seemed unsure of his decision and admitted that he was influenced by Griff playing "wild" poker from the very beginning of the final day.
Final result:
Isai Scheinberg took 7th place in the $50,000 buy-in High Roller tournament, but the tournament was won by Jared Bleznick ($2,037,947).
Many years ago, Jared was one of the most odious figures in high stakes online. Here's what 2+2 wrote about him in 2013: "It is common knowledge within the high stakes PLO community that Jared Bleznick has been blatantly multi-accounting the games with at least 5-6 accounts to gain edge on Pokerstars and FTP. He is most likely playing from a VPN out of New York and the accounts associated with him have been seen to play within minutes of each other. He is the worst offender and poker sites should deal with him harshly, in the same vein as Bet365 dealt with Jepsen and Gulkines multi-accounting Isildur1."
Now those stories are long forgotten, Jared has long abandoned online poker, and appears offline quite rarely. In recent years, he has focused on selling sports cards. One of his shops is in Las Vegas, and he advertises his business at every opportunity.
He also showed up to the championship photo shoot with a pack of baseball cards. During the main event, he brought a whole box to the TV table.
"It's worth exactly the same as the buy-in for this tournament," he told his neighbors. "There are 10 packs of $1,000 each, and I'll open one at each level."
Bleznik played this year's World Series very tightly and successfully. One of the factors was that he was ignored in the $25k draft, Jared even promised to become the most valuable player in fantasy next year. This year he would have scored 226 points – also a very decent result. Jared found additional motivation with the help of Shaun Deeb.
"The person I want to thank the most is Shaun Deeb. I made all these side bets with him and it forced me to play all these tournaments. I never would have played this tournament if I didn't have side action. I've been friends with him for a long time, and just beat him out of a lot of money. But the reality of it is this summer was about proving that I can win. My whole career I beat everyone playing heads up but in a tournament structure I just wanted to prove that I can beat all these guys. Obviously I just did it, but Shaun motivated me."
"I think the best thing about poker is that it keeps changing. It's like any business, or anything in life. The top players from ten years ago are not the top players today. Like Jesse Lonis, he's a young kid, one of the top players in the world and he wasn't playing five years ago. So there's new guys coming in, figuring out new things and getting better. My job is to overcome all that, try to figure out what they're doing and beat that style, which is something I've always been good at playing heads up poker."
Lonis received $1,358,633 for second place:
"It was a fun summer a little sad I only profited 2 million but we will take what we can get. Always next year!" Lonis tweeted.
“Rookie numbers mate,” Dominic Nietzsche teased.
"If I was DTOing I'd have profited at least 5 million," Jesse retorted. "With promo code "always next year" save 20% alright I'm done 😂."
The prestigious $10,000 buy-in 6-max event was won by Michael Rocco ($924,922).
In heads-up, Michael beat French professional Alexandre Reard, who won this tournament in 2023. Alexandre was as close as possible to repeating his success. He started the final table with a stack of 105 blinds, when none of their opponents had even 40. The Frenchman started heads-up with a 3-to-1 advantage and in one of the first hands he got it all in preflop with eights against sevens. However, on the flop, Rocco hit a set.
5th place went to Adrian Mateos ($198,261), 6th place went to Egor Prokop ($142,316).
Michael Rocco told reporters that this is the last World Series he will play every day.
"It all stems from health, like having an understanding of health and having an understanding of the systems that we're living under. There is a lot of influence from pharmaceutical companies on the food industry, and food is the basis of what we put into our bodies and what gives us health.
So, the proper mineralisation of the soil is actually the proper mineralisation of the human body. As they farm and use synthetically induced chemicals to grow food, that pulls the minerals out of the soil and therefore, the humans cannot get it from the food, and the human race becomes weaker and weaker over time until we put chips in our heads and become robots."
It is interesting that at the start of this World Series, Rocco also said that he would play little and even asked Daniel Negreanu not to take him in fantasy. At the very end of the draft, Mike Nouri did call Rocco for $1, but Daniel vetoed. Nouri had to settle for Taylor Paur, who brought 6 points. And Michael Rocco would have scored 370 (only Jeremy Ausmus has more) and led Nouri's team to second place.
Xixiang Luo ($725,796) won his second bracelet of the summer in the $25,000 HORSE event.
He got his first in the exotic NLHE/PLO Double Board Bomb Pot tournament with a buy-in of $1,500.
Dear HORSE collected 120 entries – a record figure in the short history of this competition. It was first held in 2021 (78 entries), was cancelled in 2022, and last year it attracted 112 participants.
At the final table, the Chinese representative faced limit game mastodons – Phil Ivey (4th place), Scott Seiver (6th), David Benyamine (7th) and others.
In the top 7, Luo was on the verge of elimination. In stud hi-lo, he got all in with five cards with a pair of eights and a gutshot against Ryan Miller's pair of kings. Miller bought two pair with his seventh card, leaving Luo with eight outs, one of which came.
In heads-up, Luo beat Lebanese Albert Daher ($483,866) – commenting on the final table of the main event, Aurora said that his friend Albert has eight wives, but this rather upsets him, there are a lot of accompanying difficulties... Third place went to Michael Monchek ($336,442), for whom the summer began with a loss of $2 million on the Hustler stream.
On this day, Monchek also reached the final table of a $5k online tournament that was played offline. Several hybrid tournaments were held at the WSOP this year, and Artur Martirosyan took 4th place in one of them.
– Unreal scenario! Made 2 Final tables tomorrow including 25k HORSE! If there’s any way WSOP and Jack Effel can help me out tomorrow with playing both that’d be super appreciated! – Mike addressed the organizers.
But the problem went away on its own and Mike was eliminated in the first hand, < .
On the final day of the series, one of the recognized poker all-rounders and good guys Alex "rumnchess" Livingston won the $3k ($390,621) PLO.
"I really do love all the games, like the 10-game, 9-game mix, and H.O.R.S.E. are my best formats, but its really nice to win one in PLO because its probably the game I’ve played the most hands in, and to get one done here really feels good," the winner told reporters.
Benitez received $260,403 for second place.
“He [Bentez] said this was his second-ever live PLO tournament, so I don’t know why he gave me that information, but it made me want to play as much post-flop as possible so I just would limp a lot of buttons and see where the action played out on the later streets, and it wound up working in my favor."
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