The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 66
Four days out and the offseason is settling its side bets. Daniel Negreanu won his own 25K Fantasy League for the first time in fifteen years as commissioner, taking the $250,000 top prize plus an undisclosed pile in side action, per PokerNews. Alex and Kristen Foxen won the ODB $500 league for $100,000 out of a record 1,199 teams. Naoya Kihara, drafted for one dollar, put up 510 points and became the first player in league history past 500. Elsewhere: Card Player filled in the numbers we flagged as missing yesterday, and Carson Wieland's WSOPC Choctaw Main Event win turns out to be a $268,245 career-best over 1,117 entries. Rami Hammoud told Poker.Org he was down to his last $1,000 before a hallway conversation and a satellite got him into the Main. Mario Boos explained to PokerNews why he passed on a $250,000 pay-jump consideration to flip for the win. And new video obtained by a Las Vegas TV station shows Jared Griener barefoot and duct-taped at a neighbor's door.
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Daniel Negreanu won the 15th annual 25K Fantasy League, the summer-long WSOP draft competition he runs, for the first time in its history, per PokerNews. Team DNegs finished with 1,337 points, a 268-point margin over David Baker's Team Banana at 1,069. The league drew a record-tying 24 teams and paid $600,000 across the top five. Negreanu's official take was $250,000, and PokerNews notes it was well known he had a larger but undisclosed amount riding in side bets. His roster did it on breadth rather than a single monster: Josh Arieh led with 356 points, sixth-best in the field, Negreanu himself put up 294, Nick Pupillo 210, Dong Chen 150, Bryn Kenney 103, Jason Koon 73 and Eli Elezra 61. His eighth pick, Ben Lamb, skipped the 2026 WSOP entirely and produced zero points, which makes the margin funnier. The real story of the league is Naoya Kihara, who Baker drafted for $1 and who returned 510 points across 18 cashes and two bracelets, the first player to cross 500 in league history and a points-per-dollar figure of 510. Kihara still lost. Shaun Deeb, drafted at $133, the most expensive player named in the top ten, returned 331 points on six cashes for 2.49 points per dollar, and his own Team Lucky finished 19th of 24 with 648. Six of the 192 drafted players scored zero, and the most expensive of them was Scott Bohlman at $35. Isaac Haxton went for $19 and also blanked. Thirty-three of the 100 bracelet events were won by a player drafted in the 25K Fantasy or as an ODB Bonus Player.
Why it mattersThe commissioner winning his own league in year fifteen is either the best possible ending or the exact thing conspiracy-brained poker Twitter was waiting for, and the honest answer is that his roster was fine and his draft was disciplined and Ben Lamb's zero should have killed him. It did not, because the field mostly bricked. The Kihara line is the one worth staring at: two bracelets, 18 cashes, 510 points, acquired for one dollar out of a $200 budget. Baker found the single best asset in the game for the price of nothing and still finished second by 268 points, which tells you how much of fantasy poker is roster construction and how little is the hit. The other number that matters: a third of the 2026 bracelets went to a couple hundred drafted players out of 251,899 entries. The pros are still the pros.
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A team owned by Alex and Kristen Foxen won the ODB $500 Fantasy League, the larger sibling to Negreanu's game, taking the $100,000 top prize with 1,897 points, per PokerNews. The 2026 edition drew a record 1,199 teams and a $599,500 prize pool paying the top 100. Their margin over Team Vengrin and bear it was 39 points. Alex Foxen scored 441 points himself at a $79 price tag, second-most of any player in the game behind Kihara's 510, and accounted for 23.25 percent of his own team's score while eating 39.5 percent of the cap. Calvin Anderson added 385 at $25, Martin Zamani 337 at $3, Dylan Smith 293 at $59, and Kristen Foxen chipped in 162 at $16. Their bonus pick was Nick Palma, who had been publicly annoyed about going undrafted in the 25K Fantasy and responded with 173 points across 16 cashes, third among all ODB bonus players. There is also a $2,500 consolation prize for finishing last, which went to Team Degen Summer Campers 2 and its 222 points. PokerNews reports its own teams did not do well. Greg Mueller is an ODB bonus player and is still alive at the Main Event final table, but PokerNews notes he needs fourth or better to cash and it will not move the top of the leaderboard either way.
Why it mattersDrafting yourself for $79 and then justifying it is the flex. Foxen has been the most consistently productive tournament player in the world for two years and he priced himself accordingly and still returned value, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a person betting on his own labor. The Palma detail is the fun one: he complained about being left out of the expensive league, got taken as a bonus flier in the cheap one, and out-earned most of the priced roster. Also note the shape of the two leagues. The 25K Fantasy has 24 teams and pays $600,000 to five of them. The ODB has 1,199 teams and pays $599,500 to a hundred. Same money, wildly different variance, and the couple that already prints in the actual tournaments won the softer-looking one.
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Yesterday we had the Choctaw Main Event headline and none of the math. Card Player's Erik Fast has now published it. Carson Wieland, a Texas resident, topped 1,117 entries in the $1,700 WSOP Circuit Choctaw Main Event, which ran July 24 to 27, for $268,245 and his first career gold ring. The $1 million guarantee was beaten by more than $692,000. The score more than doubled Wieland's total career earnings. His previous best was $35,070 for a runner-up finish in a $1,100 pot-limit Omaha event at the 2024 Champions Winter Poker Open. Brian Green went out 21st, Luis Yepez 14th and Hunter Cichy 12th. The final table's biggest name was Braxton Dunaway, who finished third in the 2025 WSOP Main Event and won a $2,000 no-limit hold'em bracelet this summer for $288,064. Dunaway cracked Viet Vo's pocket kings with pocket nines, then finished the four-time WPT finalist off in sixth with ace-jack against king-ten on a queen-six-five-five-queen board. He busted Lawrence Wayne in fourth with pocket threes against king-jack. Then he ran nine-seven of diamonds into Alex Ho's pocket aces on a king-jack-deuce board with a diamond in it, missed, and took $125,510 for third. That puts Dunaway near $6 million in career earnings. Ho took a better than 3.5-to-1 chip lead into heads-up and lost three consecutive preflop races: pocket fours over ace-jack suited, pocket eights over king-queen, and finally pocket fours again over ace-king on a queen-queen-four flop. Ho picked up a single out on the jack of clubs turn, needing a royal flush, and got the seven of spades. He earned $179,030.
Why it mattersThe guarantee overlay is the number that should get the attention. Choctaw scheduled a $1 million guarantee for a $1,700 main event in Durant, Oklahoma, starting the same week the WSOP ended in Las Vegas, and beat it by 69 percent. Between this, the 936-entry Horseshoe Las Vegas main and the 400-entry Choctaw mini, the Circuit generated three real fields in ten days while the actual World Series was in cold storage. As for the poker, Ho lost three flips in a row with the tournament in his hands and had a one-outer available to survive the last one. Dunaway losing a stack-off with a flush draw against aces is the least remarkable way for a Main Event third-place finisher to exit a tournament, which is somehow the point.
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Rami Hammoud arrived in Las Vegas on June 18 with $20,000 for the summer and by early July was down to his last $1,000, he told Poker.Org's Craig Tapscott. 'I was getting stomped. My confidence was low. I had zero intention of playing the Main Event.' What changed was a hallway. Hammoud ran into another Montreal player while walking through Paris, told him the summer was going horribly and that he was going home, and got pushed back on: 'You're not gonna play the Main? I'll buy a big piece of you, you just gotta play.' Hammoud took the last $1,000 into a satellite, won it outright and never had to sell the piece. He is not a professional, and says so plainly: 'Poker is definitely more than a passion, but less than a profession.' He tried it as a job long ago and quit because losing days became mandatory workdays. His method for the Main Event was a genuine logistical commitment to not caring. Every morning he checked out of his room, dropped his luggage at the bell desk, played the day, then rebooked the hotel after bagging. 'My mantra every single day was I have a flight to catch, so I am ready to die at any point in time. This carried with me all the way to the final table. I was ready to go at any time. I did not care. I genuinely did not care. I was a bit more aggressive than perhaps other players.' This is his fourth Main Event and he has never cashed one. He says he has never before held more than 100,000 chips in it. He also told Poker.Org he stopped studying entirely after the 2025 series, did not open a solver for a year until two weeks ago, and reset his goal from maximizing profit to maximizing fun. His day-by-day: 62,000 after Day 1C, 281,000, 697,000, 1,490,000, 2,630,000, then 17,400,000 on Day 6, 41,500,000 on Day 7 and 79,000,000 at the bag. Career earnings $1,512,438, second in chips, at least $1 million locked.
Why it mattersEvery year somebody at the Main Event final table has a story about running bad and getting staked into it, and most of those stories are retrofitted. Hammoud's has receipts and a hotel folio. The checkout ritual is the part that will stick, because it is the rare case of a player building an actual physical apparatus to enforce a mental state rather than just claiming the mental state afterward. The uncomfortable follow-up is the one he raises himself: he is now doing interview after interview and being reminded constantly what is at stake. 'It is going to be really, really hard to get back to that version of Rami.' Fifty-three big blinds is a fine stack. Playing it like a man with a flight to catch when there is $10 million on the table and a camera on your face is a different exercise, and August 3 is the test.
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French player Mario Boos told PokerNews he seriously considered folding pocket tens on Day 8 with ten players left and Malcolm Trayner short, then decided against it. 'It was amazing, because Malcolm was short, I had to make a decision: take a pay jump for $250,000 or play for the win. I chose the bracelet.' The tens held against Han Feng's ace-king, Boos doubled to a playable stack and Feng survived as the short stack at the final table. Boos had $239,888 in Hendon Mob earnings coming into the Main Event. His previous best score was $54,659 for sixth in the 2025 €380 Italian Poker Sport Main Event, and his second-best is a $49,481 Swiss Poker Series Main Event win earlier this year. Most of his career results are French tournaments with buy-ins between €100 and €500. He has never cashed the Main Event and has roughly half a dozen WSOP cashes total. The $1 million he has already locked is close to twenty times his prior career best. His chip graph is the least linear at the table: 27,000 at the end of Day 1d, good for 2,377th of 3,638, then 165,500, then a drop to 91,200, then 800,000 on Day 4, then 7,850,000 on Day 5 to sit sixth of 174, then 17,950,000, 24,300,000, and 44,000,000 at the bag. Asked how he felt after making it, Boos said: 'I don't have any answer. I don't know. I feel nothing. I have to sleep, get some rest. Fly home, and then I come back for the final table.' His preparation plan is 'sleep and go to the gym and for sure study the table. Yeah. For sure. But after the gym.' His rail waved a full-sized French flag when he doubled through Feng and he wore it for final table photos. 'It was amazing support. All my friends, everybody. Without them, I don't know.'
Why it mattersThis is the decision that shaped the seating chart, and it went the other way from how most of the field would have played it. A player whose entire career earnings were $239,888 chose to risk a locked $250,000 pay jump on a coin flip because he wanted the bracelet. He won the flip, which means we get to call it brave instead of stupid, and the counterfactual matters: had it gone the other way, Feng is the one with 44 million and Boos is a footnote. There is also a structural point buried in it. The ninth-to-tenth gap in this Main Event is enormous because ninth pays $1,000,000, so 'take the pay jump' was a live and defensible option that most short-stack theory would endorse. Boos declined it in the last event of the year where declining it is worth $9 million. He is sixth of nine with 29 big blinds.
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KSNV News 3 Las Vegas obtained and aired video of Jared Griener moments after the July 12 robbery of his Summerlin Airbnb, per PokerNews. It shows him barefoot with duct tape still around his hand, at a neighbor's door: 'Please help me. Somebody just broke into the house across the street and robbed me. They took my phone. They took everything I have. They tied me up, I just got out. Can you call 911? If you're there? Please, please help me.' A second KSNV video shows two men walking toward the Airbnb and leaving roughly twenty minutes later carrying what appears to be a backpack. Griener's own account, posted to X on July 13 and expanded afterward, is that he got home around 8 p.m. after busting the $1,500 Closer, found the front door locked, walked in, and 'two men came around the corner and immediately jumped on me and tackled me to the ground.' He says they tied his arms behind his back, told him not to move or they would kill him, demanded to know where his backpack was, and that he begged them to take what they wanted and let him live. He says they then duct-taped him into a hog-tie and stacked dishes on his back so they would hear him if he moved, then searched the house. He worked himself free after they left. He had cashed out his entire summer roll, including $57,500 for finishing 218th in the Main Event. Griener has $3.3 million in live earnings, sits second on Utah's all-time money list, and is a fixture on Hustler Casino Live, Live at the Bike and Bally Live. The story has run in the Los Angeles Times, TMZ and the New York Post. PokerNews notes it reached out to Griener for comment.
Why it mattersWe have had this on the watchlist for two weeks as an open LVMPD matter with no arrests, and it still is. What changed is that there is now footage, and the footage takes it out of the category of thing poker people read about and into the category of thing local TV news covers, which is how the LA Times and the New York Post got here. The detail that should make every grinder reading this uncomfortable is the pre-positioning. The door was locked. They were already inside. They knew about the backpack and asked for it by name. That is not opportunistic. Poker players carrying cash have been targets forever, from the Houston card room crews to Mo Nuwwarah's car in Chinatown, but this is the version where somebody knew the schedule. Nobody has been arrested.
Unchanged official bags going into the August 3 restart. New today: PokerNews published the actual seating draw, which is not the same as the chip order. By seat: 1 Saaskilahti, 2 Gagliano, 3 Boos, 4 Mueller, 5 Shaevel, 6 Feng, 7 Hammoud, 8 Evagorou, 9 Jumalon. That puts the chip leader directly to the left of the two shortest stacks at the table, which is about as bad a draw as Evagorou and Feng could have gotten. Big blinds at the restart: Jumalon 129, Hammoud 53, Shaevel 37, Mueller 32, Gagliano 31, Boos 29, Saaskilahti 25, Feng 17, Evagorou 15. Payouts locked from $10,000,000 for first down to $1,000,000 for ninth.
No Main Event eliminations. Vegas stays dark until August 3. Everything above is from the Circuit and from the fantasy leagues, which have now officially closed their books for 2026.
Took a better than 3.5-to-1 chip lead into heads-up and lost three preflop races in a row. The last one was his ace-king against pocket fours on a queen-queen-four flop, which left him needing runner-runner for a royal flush after the jack of clubs turn.
2025 WSOP Main Event third-place finisher and a 2026 bracelet winner. Got it in with a nine-seven diamond flush draw on a king-jack-deuce board against Ho's pocket aces and bricked. Now near $6 million in career earnings.
Outraced by Dunaway's pocket threes holding against king-jack.
Started the final day as chip leader. Ran pocket threes into Alex Ho's pocket fives and never caught up.
Four-time World Poker Tour finalist. Had his pocket kings cracked by Dunaway's pocket nines, then lost the rest with king-ten against ace-jack.
Not a bustout so much as an absence. Lamb skipped the 2026 WSOP entirely after being drafted for $14 by Negreanu. Negreanu won the league anyway, which makes Lamb the most efficient dead weight in fantasy poker history.
The most expensive blank of the summer at $35 in the draft. Six of 192 drafted players scored zero. Isaac Haxton went for $19 and also failed to record a cash.
Frozen at the top until WSOP Paradise fires December 1. Turns up in today's fantasy reporting as the priciest player on the top-ten scoring list at $133, returning 331 points on six cashes for 2.49 points per dollar. His own fantasy team, Team Lucky, finished 19th of 24.
Still 22 points back with nothing left to play until Paradise. Today's number: 510 fantasy points on an 18-cash summer, the first player ever past 500 in the 25K Fantasy, drafted for one dollar by David Baker. Two of his 2026 bracelets were $10,000 championships, in 2-7 lowball draw and seven card stud.
Twenty-nine points off the lead and idle until December. Won $100,000 in the ODB Fantasy League this week with a team he built around himself, contributing 441 points at a $79 price, second only to Kihara.
The engine of Negreanu's winning 25K Fantasy roster, at a $55 price and 15 cashes. Not currently in the top three of the official WSOP POY race in our sources, but 15 cashes is a real summer by any measure.
2025 Main Event third-place finisher, won a $2,000 bracelet this summer for $288,064, and just took third at WSOPC Choctaw for $125,510. Quietly one of the most consistent runs of the past year.