Mohsin Charania and Max Silver officially lost their membership to the “best player with no WSOP bracelet” club last night in Las Vegas.
Silver was the first one to strike gold as he outlasted 256 runners in the $3k Limit Hold’em 6-Max event to win $172k.
Charania followed that up by topping a big $1,500 NLHE event that attracted 1,580 players. He took down $364k for his efforts.
Prior to last night both players had $3m+ in earnings but neither had ever won a WSOP bracelet.
Silver Dominates Final Table
Max Silver, who was born in London but now resides in Dublin, has become renowned for making deep runs at the WSOP and finally has a bracelet to go with his impressive poker resume.
Max Silver
Silver finished 33rd in last year's Main Event and also placed eighth in the 2011 WSOP Europe Main Event.
He was dominant last night and held the chip lead for the vast majority of play, only sinking down to even with the rest of the players briefly during three-handed play.
In the end Silver out-dueled Bay Area pro Guowei “Tommy” Zhang. Zhang earned $106k for finishing runner up.
The final table actually wrapped early last night, which allowed Silver to make a flight back to Dublin that he had previously booked. He’ll return to the WSOP in a few days, however.
Here’s a look at the complete payouts for the final table of Event 53: $3,000 Limit Hold’em 6-max:
1st: Max Silver, $172,645
2nd: Guowei Zhang, $106,694
3rd: Mickey Craft, $69,789
4th: Lena Wang, $46,871
5th: Ayman Qutami, $32,345
6th: Georgios Kapalas, $22,952
Charania Beats Stacked $1,500 Final Table
You don’t always see a large number of poker pros at the $1,500 NLHE final tables but Charania had his hands full last night.
The table featured businessman/poker pro Cary Katz, two-WSOP bracelet winner Andy Frankenberger, Russian pro Mikhail Rudoy and 2014 EPT Barcelona runner-up finisher Samuel Phillips.
Mohsin Charania
Luckily Charania had one thing the other competitors didn’t: A raucous crowd cheering him on.
"This happens when I'm just playing online on Tuesday, so I'm used to it. Wait until you see me get deep in like a $109 [online]. It's just chaos," said Charania in the winner interview with the WSOP.
"No, you get used to it and you learn to block it out and you know like you're kind of excited because you know that when you win a pot, everyone is going to cheer for you, so it's kind of nice.”
Charania had a tough position at the final table because he was on the direct left of talented pro Samuel Phillips.
It was Charania, however, that finally landed the knockout blow on Phillips when he snapped off a Phillips’ shove with K♦ 3♦ with A♦ 8♠.
From there Charania busted Brandon Ageloff to secure a nearly 3-1 heads-up chip lead against Cary Katz.
Katz was in a unique position at the final table because he owns the PokerGO streaming service that was broadcasting the event.
Unfortunately for Katz a comeback wasn’t in the cards as Charania found A♠ Q♣ to Katz’ K♣ Q♦ to close out the event.
Here’s a look at the final-table payouts for Event 52: $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em:
1st: Mohsin Charania - $364,438
2nd: Cary Katz - $225,181
3rd: Brandon Ageloff - $161,844
4th: Andy Frankenberger - $117,611
5th: Mikhail Ruody - $86,424
6th: Samuel Phillips - $64,226
7th: Ian Steinman - $48,276
8th: Yanki Koppel - $36,708
9th: Milan Simko - $28,239
