Player Wins Gold Bracelet at $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha
Phil Galfond won his first WSOP gold bracelet playing the $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha with Re-buys. The winner stated, “Winning a gold bracelet wins a player respect from ones seniors. Winning against a line up of players that are tough players makes the victory sweeter.”
The winner took home a sum of $817,781, which is the second-highest prize ever paid to the winner of a Pot-Limit Omaha tournament. Phil occupied the top spot in the 2008 WSOP earnings list by a narrow margin leading into the final table as the chip leader with 1,393,000.
He was being chased by a pack of players that boasted impressive qualifications. The pack of players chasing him included 11-time bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth, Jr. and 10-time bracelet winner Johnny Chan, but also Daniel Negreanu and John Juanda. These four players had combined to win more than 100 WSOP cash prizes in their careers.
But as the final table started, the big names started to fall away. Hellmuth, the all-time leader in WSOP finished eighth, Negreanu, who had more than $85,000 at stake finished seventh, Juanda, who has more WSOP finishes than any other player since 2000 finished sixth and picked up $154,296 while Chan was fourth and Benyamine took third.
When the final two players started facing each other, the winner was the leader with a 4.1 million-2.1 million chip lead. The runners up fought hard to remain in contention for more then 100 hands, but gave up when the winner’s two pair prevailed over his pair of aces.
Phil Galfond is a 23-year-old native of Wisconsin who now has five WSOP cash prizes that include a 45th-place finish in the $10,000 World Championship Heads-Up No Limit event where he won $14,438.
