The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 57
Day five of the offseason, thirteen days to the restart, and the fantasy ledger finally closes. The Foxens, who already own a sixth bracelet and a bracelet-winning summer between them, drafted themselves in the $500 ODB Fantasy League and beat a record 1,199 teams for $100,000, per PokerNews. The profile machine also finished its homework: PokerNews' dedicated features on Mario Boos and Han Feng are in, and they turn out to be two halves of the same coin flip, the six-figure race that decided who came back with chips and who came back with 17 big blinds and a shrug. And out in Los Angeles, Nik Airball is now the winningest player in Hustler Casino Live history, a sentence that would have been a joke in 2023 and is now just math. Tonight at 9 p.m. ET, the first ESPN2 edited episodes air. Set your DVRs and your priors.
Story 01 of 3
The $500 ODB Fantasy League, the people's side game that runs alongside Negreanu's 25K Fantasy, wrapped with a record 1,199 teams and a $599,500 prize pool, per PokerNews' Chad Holloway. The winner: Team 'Are you monica?', owned by Alex and Kristen Foxen, who scored 1,897 points to win $100,000 by a 39-point margin. The couple's secret weapon was themselves. Alex drafted Alex for $79 and Alex delivered 441 points, the second-highest total of any player in the league behind only Naoya Kihara's 510. Kristen chipped in 162 points at a $16 price. The roster also leaned on Calvin Anderson (385 points, fourth-best overall) and $3 bargain Martin Zamani (337), plus bonus pick Nick Palma, who was publicly annoyed about going undrafted in the 25K and answered with 173 points across 16 cashes. One loose end: Greg Mueller is an ODB bonus player still alive at the Main Event final table, but PokerNews notes his finish cannot alter the top standings, so the trophy is safe. The top 100 teams got paid, and last place took home a $2,500 consolation prize for 222 points, proof that even the worst fantasy summer beats most real ones.
Why it mattersThe Foxens' 2026 is starting to look like a season-long flex: Kristen's historic sixth bracelet and $1.7 million in the $25K High Roller, Alex sitting third in the official POY race at 3,381 points, and now a six-figure fantasy title won substantially on their own backs. There is something perfectly poker about the best players in the pool being allowed to bet on themselves at retail prices. The perfect-lineup exercise stings for everyone else: 25KFantasy.com's optimal roster cost $199 of the $200 cap and scored 3,213 points, anchored, inevitably, by the $1 Kihara. The sharpest fantasy room in poker had all summer to find him and mostly did not.
Story 02 of 3
PokerNews published its dedicated final table features on Mario Boos and Han Feng, and read together they document the single race that shaped the bottom half of the August Nine. With ten left and short-stacked Malcolm Trayner circling a $250,000 pay jump, Boos got pocket tens in against Feng's ace-king for a six-figure-value flip and held. 'I had to make a decision: take a pay jump for $250,000 or play for the win. I chose the bracelet,' Boos told PokerNews. The Frenchman's whole run reads like that: he bagged Day 1d with 27,000 chips, roughly a third of a starting stack, and spun it into 44,000,000 by Day 8. His career resume before this was $239,888 in mostly small French buy-ins, a best score of $54,659, and zero Main Event cashes. Feng, meanwhile, had a one-way ticket to Europe planned for after the series. Per PokerNews' Will Shillibier, the 2024 GPI Mid-Major Player of the Year sat on the dinner break as the shortest stack thinking, in his words, 'okay, if I die, I die.' Then his king-six beat Lucas Jumalon's jack-eight in the first all-in of his entire tournament, and the grinder's fatalism turned into 25,000,000 chips and a final table seat. 'Now it's cut short,' he said of the Europe trip, which is the most cheerful sentence ever spoken about canceling a vacation.
Why it mattersEvery dedicated PokerNews profile of the August Nine is now on file except Shaevel's and Saaskilahti's, and these two complete the strategic map of the table's middle and bottom. Boos is the amateur-shaped wrecking ball who has already declared he is not playing for ladders, which should terrify the short stacks and delight the broadcast. Feng is the professional realist with 17 big blinds who has been mentally dead once already and doubled anyway. When the ESPN edit airs tonight, the Boos-Feng flip is exactly the kind of hand that decides who the cameras anoint. One of them chose the bracelet. The other chose acceptance. Poker gave them adjacent seats.
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Nik Airball, three years removed from losing a $1 million heads-up match to Matt Berkey, has passed vlogger Mariano Grandoli as the all-time profit leader on Hustler Casino Live, per PokerNews' Jon Sofen. Airball took the lead with a $150,000 winning session earlier in the week, edging past Grandoli's $3.325 million lifetime mark, and then the gap widened without him lifting a finger: Grandoli dropped $305,000 on Friday night's stream while Airball was not even in the game. The stream's own graphic now puts Airball around $3.4 million lifetime against Grandoli's roughly $3 million. The fine print, which poker Twitter supplied immediately: Garrett Adelstein, banned since the jack-four saga in 2022, sits ninth all-time at $1.55 million earned in barely a year, and the ledger also ignores the year Airball himself spent banned from Hustler in 2024. Across 1,300-plus hours, Airball's rate works out to roughly $2,500 an hour, strong but not the best among the 300-hour club, where Ethan 'Rampage' Yau clears about $7,400 an hour. The other end of the leaderboard remains safely held by Michael 'Texas Mike' Moncek at minus $4.38 million.
Why it mattersThis is the quiet late-stage act of one of poker's stranger redemption arcs. Airball entered public consciousness as the loud guy losing a million to Berkey, and he is now, by the only scoreboard livestream cash games have, the most profitable player in the history of poker's most-watched stream. The asterisks are real: Adelstein's absence, the ban year, and the fact that lifetime totals reward volume as much as skill. But minus 1 million to plus 3.4 million on camera is a swing you cannot argue with, and with the WSOP dark for two more weeks, the cash streams are the only live scoreboard poker has.
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.
Frozen at the top until WSOP Paradise fires December 1 at Baha Mar. Still 22 clear of Kihara and 29 clear of Foxen.
Today's ODB wrap adds another line to the legend: 25KFantasy.com's perfect lineup starts with the $1 Kihara and his league-best 510 points. The offseason continues to be his highlight reel.
Third in the race that pays $1 million, first in the fantasy league that paid $100,000 today. His 441 points were the second-most of any player in the ODB pool, behind only the guy above him on this list.