Martin Kabrhel Wins Seventh Bracelet, Loses Separate Argument With A Vending Machine

Martin Kabrhel added a seventh WSOP bracelet to his collection Thursday while simultaneously conducting a heated, ultimately unsuccessful negotiation with a vending machine that had taken his dollar and given him nothing in return. Witnesses say Kabrhel, who was reportedly still seated at the final table when the dispute began, refused to leave the tournament floor to resolve it in person, instead shouting updates about both situations at once to anyone within earshot.

The vending machine, located outside the tournament room and stocked primarily with pretzels, became involved after Kabrhel inserted a dollar bill for a bag of chips that hung suspended on its coil, visible but unreachable. Floor staff say he spent the next ninety minutes alternating between raising bets and narrating the machine's failures, at one point reportedly announcing a river shove and the machine's continued refusal to drop the chips in the same sentence.

'He kept saying "this is rigged" and I genuinely could not tell which situation he meant,' said a nearby player, who asked not to be identified. A tournament official confirmed that Kabrhel had, at various points, requested a floor ruling on both his final-table hand and the vending machine, and that only one of those requests was actually within the tournament staff's authority to resolve.

Kabrhel ultimately won the bracelet with a hand that observers described as 'somehow the least complicated thing that happened all day.' He called the win 'a nice bonus' and the vending machine dispute 'the real final table,' adding that he intends to file a formal complaint with the casino's facilities department, a body he described as 'worse to negotiate with than most poker players I've faced today.'

The vending machine has not commented. A casino spokesperson said the machine would be serviced 'as a routine matter, unrelated to any ongoing tournament business,' while declining to say whether Kabrhel's dollar would be refunded. Kabrhel, for his part, said he was less interested in the dollar than in 'the principle,' a word he used four times in a two-minute interview otherwise dedicated to his bracelet win.

Asked whether he planned to eat the pretzels if the machine ever released them, Kabrhel said he had 'moved past that' and was 'focused on the bracelet now,' before immediately asking a passing staff member whether anyone had checked on the machine.

By the time the tournament floor cleared for the night, the vending machine had become something of a spectacle in its own right, with several rail-goers reportedly gathering to watch the ongoing standoff rather than the bracelet ceremony itself. One staff member said she had never seen a player treat a stuck bag of pretzels with 'the same intensity as an all-in decision,' adding that Kabrhel had, at one point, asked whether the tournament's floor supervisor could 'make a ruling on appeal.'