The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 55
Day three of the offseason and the ledgers are open. PokerNews finalized the 25K Fantasy standings, and the commissioner won his own league: Daniel Negreanu's Team DNegs took the $250,000 top prize on the strength of a Josh Arieh season and despite Ben Lamb contributing exactly zero points. The real story inside the story is Naoya Kihara, drafted for one dollar and posting a record 510 points. Meanwhile the great post-series accounting continued, and the numbers are humbling: Shaun Deeb turned a bracelet, a runner-up, and a Main Event deep run into a profit of $89,286, or roughly $1,440 per chicken tender consumed. And the August Nine profile machine reached the short stack: Evagoras Evagorou, the Cypriot sports bettor playing his first ever Main Event, who has 15 big blinds, a locked-up million, and a country that has never seen this before. Fifteen days to the final table.
Story 01 of 3
Per PokerNews, the 15th annual 25K Fantasy League is in the books, and for the first time in its history the winner is the commissioner himself. Daniel Negreanu's Team DNegs posted 1,337 points to beat David 'ODB' Baker's Team Banana (1,069) for the $250,000 first prize out of a $600,000 pool across a record-tying 24 teams. Negreanu also had a larger, undisclosed amount riding in side bets. Josh Arieh led the winning roster with 356 points, Negreanu chipped in 294 himself, and the team survived Ben Lamb, a $14 draft pick who skipped the entire WSOP and scored zero. The individual crown went to Japan's Naoya Kihara, whose two bracelets and 18 cashes produced an unprecedented 510 points, the first 500-point season in league history. Team Banana drafted him for exactly $1, which works out to 510 points per dollar, the ultimate value pick in the league's 15 years. The Zero Points Club had six members, headlined by Scott Bohlman, who cost Team Browndog $35 and returned nothing. Shaun Deeb, the $133 top salary, scored 331 points, and his own Team Lucky finished 19th of 24.
Why it mattersThe 25K Fantasy is poker's most honest market: 24 rooms full of sharps pricing each other, and the guy who runs it just beat them all while his most expensive miss stayed home. Kihara at $1 will be studied like a bad beat for years, and it doubles as the season's tidiest stat line: the man who is 22 points out of the POY lead was literally the most productive player in Las Vegas this summer by fantasy math. Draft prices in next May's auction just got a lot more paranoid.
Story 02 of 3
PokerNews published its profile of Evagoras Evagorou, the Cypriot who reached the final table of the first WSOP Main Event he has ever played and became the first player from Cyprus to do it. Evagorou comes from a sports betting background, found online poker, then home games, and describes himself as 'not a professional, but I am playing a lot.' His only live tournament win is a $100 Caesars Palace daily in 2014 for $1,324, and his career-best cash before this summer was $45,490 at a Merit Poker series in Kyrenia. His run was a slow build that went vertical: 2,260,000 after Day 5, then a triple-up Day 6, then 38,200,000 by the end of Day 7, fourth of 21. A rough Day 8 left him entering the unofficial final table with 13 big blinds, and he promptly doubled through Malcolm Trayner on the very first hand; Trayner went out 10th on the final table bubble. Evagorou bags 22,500,000, last of the nine at 15 big blinds, with $1,000,000 already locked against career earnings of $253,488. He told PokerNews he is flying home to Cyprus to sort some business and bring his girlfriend and daughter back for the August 3 restart. The only other Cypriot to crack a Main Event top 100 is Charis Anastasiou, 92nd in 2007.
Why it mattersEvery August Nine needs its 'that could be me' seat and Evagorou is it: first Main Event, recreational resume, national first, shortest stack, family flying in. A win or even a runner-up would make him the biggest winner in Cypriot poker history, and 15 big blinds on a table where Lucas Jumalon holds 129 of them means his tournament will be decided in the first two levels. ESPN could not script a better opening night subplot if it tried.
Story 03 of 3
Shaun Deeb's results tweet kicked off poker's annual post-series transparency ritual, and PokerNews ran the numbers. Deeb won his ninth bracelet, finished runner-up in another event, ran deep in the Main, and made two other final tables, cashing $956,086 with bounties included. After 122 bullets and summer expenses, his profit was $89,286, a 10.3 percent ROI. He also reported eating 62 chicken tenders, which The Muck calculates at roughly $1,440 of profit per tender. Negreanu did better: $1,693,518 in profit per his final vlog, on nine cashes and bracelet number eight, before you even count the $250,000 fantasy win. Darren Rabinowitz revealed the summer's best save: he was slightly stuck across 38 events and $105,220 in buy-ins until the final day, when he denied Phil Hellmuth's 18th bracelet in the $5,000 8-Handed and turned the whole ledger into a $687,331 profit. Jamie Dwan reported $185,000 in buy-ins against $2.59 million in cashes, powered by his $2,276,691 win in the $50K High Roller. Jeremy Ausmus ($842,961 in cashes across 44 entries) and Josh Arieh (15 cashes in 42 events, led by $895,837 for second in the Poker Players Championship) shared volume but kept their bottom lines to themselves.
Why it mattersThis is the least glamorous and most important data poker produces all year. Deeb had what looks from the rail like a legendary summer, and it paid about as well as a mid-level tech job, which tells you everything about variance, expenses, and why the POY grind is a passion project with a $1 million rebate attached. The disclosures also sharpen the fantasy postmortem: the difference between a hero summer and a break-even one is usually a single final day, as Rabinowitz can now confirm in writing.
The official August Nine bags, unchanged since July 14, per PokerNews. Big blinds at the restart: Jumalon 129, Hammoud 53, Shaevel 37, Mueller 32, Gagliano 31, Boos 29, Saaskilahti 25, Feng 17, Evagorou 15.
Still 22 clear of Kihara and 29 clear of Foxen with nothing moving until WSOP Paradise in December. New context from his own disclosure: the lead cost 122 bullets and netted $89,286. Nobody is grinding POY for the money. Well, except the $1 million.
Crowned the 25K Fantasy's all-time single-season scorer with 510 points on a $1 salary, off two bracelets and 18 cashes. By at least one scoring system he already won the summer.
Second in fantasy scoring with 441 points and 14 cashes for Team Lady Gaga. The POY top three finished 1-2 in fantasy points around him; the December Paradise showdown keeps looking like an actual horse race.