The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 67
Three days out and the WSOP blinked. On Thursday evening the operator announced it will not use a shot clock at the Main Event final table after all, undoing a rule it had installed mid-tournament on Day 7 in response to Loren Klein tanking for a quarter of an hour. Elsewhere the offseason kept producing actual poker: Bryn Kenney won the $100,000 King's Charity Super High Roller in Jeju for $1,954,000 and became the first player in history past $90 million in live tournament earnings, and Jamie Dwan followed his maiden bracelet with the Goliath Super High Roller in Coventry three weeks later. A quieter story is brewing over WSOP Paradise packages, where online Circuit ring winners appear to have been written out of the deal without anybody announcing it. We also finally have final table start times, and they are three different times on three different nights, one of them behind a baseball game. Plus Rampage called Allen Kessler a cancer, and Tom Goldstein got six years.
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In a statement posted Thursday evening, the WSOP said it will not use a shot clock at the Main Event final table on August 3. 'After discussions with players and tournament staff, we've made the collective decision not to use a shot clock at next week's WSOP Main Event Final Table,' the operator wrote, adding that the goal is 'to create the most natural playing environment possible, giving players the time they need to make the biggest decisions of the tournament.' The reversal undoes a rule the WSOP had introduced on Day 7, the first shot clock in the Main Event's 57-year history, put in place after Loren Klein tanked for more than fifteen minutes on Day 6 for a pay jump and made the case for one impossible to ignore. The clock then carried through the rest of the tournament, including the day that produced this final nine. The new policy is not a total surrender. The WSOP says it reserves the right to introduce a shot clock if repeated or excessive stalling starts hurting the pace of play, players may call the clock on an opponent they think is taking unreasonable time, and tournament staff retain the authority to call it themselves, though they are expected to use that discretion only in exceptional circumstances and to remain neutral. Daniel Negreanu posted about the reversal and Shaun Deeb turned up in his replies, per Pokerfuse.
Why it mattersThe nine players who reached this final table did so under a shot clock. They will play it without one. That is a genuine change in conditions between the qualifying round and the final, and it happened by announcement three days before the restart. The argument for the reversal is real: a $10 million decision should not be made in thirty seconds because a graphic is counting down on ESPN. The argument against is the one the WSOP itself made two weeks ago when it wrote the rule, which is that this exact tournament had just produced a fifteen-minute tank for a pay jump on a broadcast the sport is trying to grow. You do not usually get to hold both positions inside three weeks. The carveout is where the real policy lives. Staff can still call the clock but are told to be neutral about it, which is another way of saying the floor will have to make a judgment call live on ESPN with $9 million between first and second on the line. Somebody is going to hate how that goes.
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Bryn Kenney won the $100,000 King's Charity Super High Roller at the King Poker Cup in Jeju, South Korea for $1,954,000 and the trophy, beating Jesse Lonis heads-up, per Card Player. The win pushed him past $90,000,000 in career live tournament earnings, the first player in the game's history to get there, per PokerListings. Kenney has held the top spot on the all-time money list for years and has now been the first to cross $70 million, $75 million and $90 million. For scale on how lopsided the top of that list is, the number two spot has never been within striking distance during his run. His 2026 summer in Las Vegas was, by his standards, quiet: he was a $103 draft pick on Negreanu's winning 25K Fantasy roster and returned 103 points, which is exactly par and which nobody would describe as a heater. Then he flew to Jeju and won two million dollars.
Why it mattersNinety million is a number with an asterisk attached to it and the asterisk is worth saying out loud: live tournament earnings are gross, not net, and Kenney's schedule is nearly all super high rollers where players sell action, swap percentages and re-enter aggressively. Nobody is claiming he banked $90 million. What the figure does measure is volume and survival at the very top buy-in level over a decade and a half, and on that measure there is no argument left to have. The other thing worth noting is where it happened. Poker's all-time money record got broken in South Korea, in July, in a charity high roller, on the same weekend the World Series of Poker was dark. The money left Vegas a while ago.
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Jamie Dwan won the £2,000 Goliath Super High Roller at Grosvenor's Goliath festival, beating Brandon Sheils heads-up for £47,200, per PokerNews. The event drew 89 entries for a £152,200 prize pool paying the top ten. It comes three weeks after Dwan won Event #90, the $50,000 No-Limit Hold'em High Roller at the 2026 WSOP, for his first bracelet and a career-best $2,276,691, a win he closed out from a heads-up deficit. Grosvenor's Goliath is Europe's largest live poker festival, built around a low buy-in main event, with the Super High Roller sitting at the top of the schedule as the pros' event.
Why it mattersThe buy-in gap is the joke and it is also the point. Dwan followed a $50,000 tournament worth $2.28 million with a £2,000 tournament worth about $63,000, roughly two point eight percent of the first one, and he presumably wanted the second one just as much. That is the actual life of a tournament player who is running hot: you play what is in front of you. The 89-entry field also says something about where the UK's best are in late July, which is at Goliath, which is a reminder that the Grosvenor festival has quietly become the thing that catches the European calendar the moment Vegas empties out.
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Every 2026 WSOP Circuit ring winner was supposed to receive a $5,000 package to the WSOP Circuit Championship at WSOP Paradise, buy-in and hotel included, a promotion the WSOP announced when it moved the Circuit to a calendar-year format. According to screenshots circulated this week by streamer Sweet4U and picked up by Pokerfuse, only live Circuit ring winners are getting the package, and online ring winners are not. Pokerfuse describes it as a departure from previous years and says the change 'seems to have passed us all by,' asking directly why it was not communicated. Patrick Leonard, who had posted earlier promoting the package as a reason to go ring hunting, resurfaced in the thread on the wrong side of the update. We have not been able to find a WSOP statement addressing the change, and the terms and conditions language we can see on wsop.com does not settle it either way.
Why it mattersThe online Circuit runs several series a year and produces a lot of rings, so if this is real it removes a meaningful chunk of Paradise entries from the promotion and quietly reduces the value of every online ring won in 2026. It also lands in a year where the WSOP has already spent a lot of goodwill on rule changes announced by tweet, from the patch approval policy in May to the shot clock going up and then coming down inside three weeks. The pattern is not that the decisions are all wrong. The pattern is that players keep finding out from each other. Treat this one as unconfirmed until the WSOP says something, and note that we are flagging it precisely because nobody has.
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We flagged yesterday that the listings we had for the August 3 restart disagreed with each other. Pokerfuse has now published a per-day breakdown, all on ESPN: August 3 starts at 5 p.m. PT on a one-hour broadcast delay, August 4 starts at 4 p.m. PT, and August 5 starts at 6 p.m. PT with the caveat that the finale may begin earlier depending on how long the preceding baseball game runs, because WSOP coverage follows the game directly. We will note honestly that this does not reconcile with other listings we have seen citing a much later ESPN2 window, and we have not found an ESPN release that settles it. Separately, Card Player's Tim Fiorvanti published a piece on the broadcast's audience, writing that 'ESPN's return into the poker space, however, has unfortunately struggled to find its audience.' The viewership figures in it are the ones we already reported: 173,000 and 186,000 for the first two edited ESPN2 episodes. What is new is the distribution problem. Per Card Player, some fans could not locate the daily ESPN+ streams during the series because WSOP was not consistently listed under ESPN's 'featured' streams. The broadcast is produced by Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning's company.
Why it mattersA three-night event with three different start times, one of them contingent on a baseball game, is not how you build an audience habit. It is how you build an audience that misses night two. The discoverability detail is the more damning one, because it suggests the problem was never entirely that people did not want to watch poker. Some of them tried and could not find it inside ESPN's own app. Poker got the biggest television deal it has had in years and then got scheduled like a rain delay. The counterargument is that the live finale is the only night that was ever going to move the number, and it airs on ESPN proper on a Wednesday with $10 million on the table. If that does not do it, the numbers are the numbers.
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Ethan 'Rampage' Yau and Allen 'Chainsaw' Kessler spent the back half of the week trading shots on X, per PokerNews' Jon Sofen. It started with Yau responding to YouTube commenters who said they would beat him: 'after beating the end boss, Adrian Mateos, and winning my 2nd WSOP bracelet, I like my chances,' a reference to his June win in WSOP Online Hybrid Event #16, the $5,000 Championship, worth $228,825, where he beat Mateos heads-up. Kessler replied that Yau is 'drawing dead' against 'a ton of notable players.' Yau then offered a $100/$200 or higher heads-up match over 100,000 hands. Kessler, a mixed game specialist, declined to play No-Limit Hold'em but offered to line up several players who would take it. Yau said he would not play any of Kessler's proxies and accused him of doing it for promotion, then escalated: he called Kessler 'a whiny ass fart degrading others constantly online,' said he has 'no backbone when push comes to shove,' and finished with 'You're a cancer to this industry.' Kessler said he would play Yau himself in mixed games only. Since the two specialize in different variants, PokerNews concludes the match is unlikely to happen. Shaun Deeb turned up mid-argument and, per German outlet Hochgepokert, sharpened the tone on both sides. Doug Polk did a vlog segment on it. Both players had good summers: Yau won his second bracelet and is up more than $1.3 million in high stakes livestream cash games, and Kessler finished top four in two bracelet events.
Why it mattersThis is a heads-up challenge in the way that most heads-up challenges are, which is to say it is content. Yau wants a No-Limit match because he is a No-Limit player on the best run of his life. Kessler wants mixed games because he is a mixed game player who is not. Neither man is going to play the other man's game, and both of them know that, which is what makes the offer safe to make. What is a little more interesting is the shape of the underlying argument. Kessler's whole public persona for fifteen years has been the guy who tells you the structure is bad and your seat is worse, and it has aged into a role where he is permanently the reply. Rampage is the newer thing: a vlogger who converted the audience into a bankroll, then converted the bankroll into a bracelet against the best hold'em player alive. Those two versions of a poker career do not have much to say to each other, which is roughly what happened here.
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Thomas Goldstein, co-founder of SCOTUSblog and a litigator who argued more than 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, was sentenced to six years in federal prison for tax evasion and mortgage fraud, per the U.S. Department of Justice and WTOP. U.S. District Judge Lydia Griggsby, sitting in Greenbelt, Maryland, also imposed five years of supervised release and more than $3.1 million in restitution, and ordered Goldstein taken into custody immediately with no bail pending appeal. Goldstein, 56, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, retired from practice in 2023 and was convicted earlier this year. Prosecutors said he concealed substantial income between 2016 and 2023, including winnings from high-stakes poker games run both in the United States and abroad. The trial included testimony from a Hollywood actor, per WTOP. Doug Polk covered the sentencing in a recent vlog alongside the Rampage and Kessler fight and the Jared Griener robbery, which is roughly how the poker world processed it.
Why it mattersThe private high-stakes game has always run on an understanding that what happens in the game stays in a spreadsheet nobody files. Goldstein is the most prominent person in years to find out what happens when the government reads the spreadsheet. He is not a professional poker player and this is not a poker prosecution, but the poker money is the reason the numbers were large and mobile and hard to explain, and the government said so in open court. Nobody in a private game is going to change how they settle up because of this. But six years, immediate custody and $3.1 million in restitution is a specific price tag on a thing a lot of people have assumed is priceless because it is invisible.
Unchanged official bags going into the August 3 restart, but the playing conditions changed Thursday night. The final nine qualified under a shot clock installed on Day 7 and will play the final table without one, per the WSOP. Seating by seat: 1 Saaskilahti, 2 Gagliano, 3 Boos, 4 Mueller, 5 Shaevel, 6 Feng, 7 Hammoud, 8 Evagorou, 9 Jumalon. Big blinds at the restart: Jumalon 129, Hammoud 53, Shaevel 37, Mueller 32, Gagliano 31, Boos 29, Saaskilahti 25, Feng 17, Evagorou 15. Payouts run from $10,000,000 for first down to $1,000,000 for ninth. Broadcast start times per Pokerfuse: 5 p.m. PT August 3 on a one-hour delay, 4 p.m. PT August 4, 6 p.m. PT August 5 following a baseball game.
No Main Event eliminations. Vegas stays dark until August 3. Everything above happened in Jeju and Coventry, which is where poker actually was this week.
Lost heads-up to Bryn Kenney in the tournament that took Kenney past $90 million in career live earnings, per Card Player. The runner-up figure is not listed in the reporting we have.
Lost heads-up to Jamie Dwan out of 89 entries and a £152,200 prize pool paying ten, per PokerNews. Dwan took £47,200 for the win.
Frozen at the top until WSOP Paradise fires December 1. Spent this week in the replies of the Rampage and Kessler fight, per Hochgepokert, which is not worth any points.
Twenty-two back with nothing left to play until Paradise. No new results in our sources.
Twenty-nine off the lead and idle until December. No new results in our sources.
Won the $100,000 King's Charity Super High Roller in Jeju for $1,954,000 over Jesse Lonis, per Card Player, clearing $90 million for the first time in the game's history. Not a factor in the WSOP POY race, which is its own kind of statement about what the money list measures.
Won WSOP Event #90, the $50,000 High Roller, for a career-best $2,276,691 and his first bracelet, then took the £2,000 Goliath Super High Roller for £47,200 over Brandon Sheils. The best month of his career by a distance.