The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 77
A police officer from Granite City, Illinois won the biggest poker title in America last night, and the payout sheet he signed is funnier than the win. Meanwhile Card Player's Player of the Year board quietly delivered the most damning number of the week: Lucas Jumalon won $10 million and is 33rd. Alex Foxen leads it, which means the two most-cited POY races in poker currently disagree about who the best player of 2026 is. And the tax provision that took $12 million off the Main Event final table has a legislative paper trail nobody is talking about, which mostly consists of the House Rules Committee saying no.
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Brett Hagopian, a police officer in Granite City, a St. Louis suburb, won the RunGood Poker Series Gateway Poker Classic $800 Main Event at Hollywood Casino St. Louis last night, beating Ben Miller heads-up for $71,740, per PokerNews' David Salituro on site. The field was 705 entries for a $493,500 prize pool, with 86 players returning for Day 2. Hagopian's live tournament earnings before this were $94,000 per the Hendon Mob, with his two best results a WSOP Daily Deepstacks event last summer and an Ameristar Poker Open win in January 2025. The final six paused to cut an ICM chop that locked Hagopian $45,740 as chip leader and left $26,000 for the eventual winner. The resulting payout sheet: first $71,740, second $39,344, third $41,992, fourth $36,276, fifth $43,585, sixth $33,268. Hagopian survived twice at short stacks, once shoving 755,000 with ace-five into Greg Iken's deuce-three and flopping two pair, then picking up aces in the big blind the next orbit. Heads-up he simply shoved every button until Miller called 13,000,000 with pocket sevens and lost to king-eight when a king flopped. On the win: 'It's No. 1, by far. I've been playing most of the RunGoods when they come through St. Louis. The only other hardware I got is an APO win.' On the week: 'I've been here all week playing every event, so I'm pretty tired. I was able to bag 200K late in flight C, and it's just been a grind all day.'
Why it mattersLook at the ladder again. Fifth place made $43,585. Second place made $39,344. Third made more than second. Fourth made almost as much as second. This is what an ICM chop does to a payout sheet when the short stacks negotiate from equity rather than position, and it is completely correct math that produces a completely insane-looking results table. Anyone reading the Hendon Mob in three years will see Ben Miller finishing runner-up for less than three players he outlasted. The other thing worth saying: the deal left only $26,000 of actual competitive value on the table, and Hagopian then played the shove-every-button strategy that the reduced stakes justify. Poker's most-discussed structural problem is that the final table of a mid-major is functionally over before it starts, and this one produced a good champion and a payout column that reads like a typo.
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Card Player's 2026 overall Player of the Year leaderboard, checked today, has Alex Foxen first with 7,109 points on five titles and twelve final tables for $4,229,256 in POY winnings. Brandon Wilson is second with 6,835, Jesse Lonis third with 6,369, Eelis Parssinen fourth with 6,081 and Danny Tang fifth with 5,796. Lucas Jumalon, the reigning world champion, sits 33rd with 3,336 points, one title and two final tables. His POY winnings column reads $10,002,859, the second-largest number in the entire top 50 behind only Bryn Kenney's $10,921,695, and Kenney is ninth. Shaun Deeb, who leads the official WSOP Player of the Year race out of Las Vegas, is 22nd here with 3,910. Naoya Kihara, second in the WSOP race, is 36th with 3,222. Maurice Hawkins is 14th with 4,512 points on five titles and $936,592 in winnings, ranking above Adrian Mateos, Isaac Haxton and the world champion. Card Player separately reported that Jumalon's Main Event win was worth 3,300 POY points and 1,550 PokerGO Tour points, which put him inside the PGT top ten immediately.
Why it mattersTwo leaderboards, two answers. The WSOP's own $1 million POY race says Shaun Deeb has had the best year in poker. Card Player says Alex Foxen, and puts Deeb 22nd. They are measuring different things, both defensibly, and the poker world cites whichever one supports the sentence it wants to write. Then there is Jumalon, who converted the single largest first prize in the sport into 33rd place, because a formula that weights titles and final tables over money is going to be unimpressed by a man who cashed twice. The Maurice Hawkins line is the one to actually stare at: five titles, $936,592, 14th overall, ahead of players who won ten times his money. If you think POY points should approximate who played best, Hawkins at 14 is the system working. If you think they should approximate who won, Jumalon at 33 is the system failing. Pick one, because you cannot cite both in the same argument.
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The provision that helped take $12,273,963 off the Main Event final table did not arrive unopposed and has not gone unchallenged, it has just lost every time. Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada introduced the Fair Accounting for Income Realized From Betting Earnings Taxation Act, the FAIR BET Act, in July 2025 to restore the full 100 percent gambling loss deduction. Co-sponsors reported include Ro Khanna of California, Troy Nehls of Texas, Stephen Horsford and Mark Amodei of Nevada and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey. Titus then tried to attach it as an amendment to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, the standard tactic for a small fix that cannot pass on its own. The Republican-controlled House Rules Committee declined to advance it, killing the floor vote, per PlayUSA. Titus on X afterward: 'Unfortunately, the GOP-controlled Rules Committee did not accept the FAIR BET Act as an amendment to the NDAA. This was an easy fix that should have been adopted. Nonetheless, I will continue to build support to restore the 100% gambling loss deduction.' Leadership's stated objection was fiscal: analysts put the revenue from the cap at roughly $1.1 billion over eight years. The one live thread is that Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith of Missouri has said at a field hearing that members on both sides are looking at a fix. The cap took effect with the 2026 tax year.
Why it mattersYesterday's number was $12,273,963, and the reasonable follow-up question is why nobody has fixed something that a bipartisan group of six co-sponsors, the horse racing lobby and the chairman of the tax-writing committee all appear to agree is broken. The answer is $1.1 billion over eight years, which in federal terms is a rounding error and in legislative terms is a scored cost that somebody has to offset. Poker's specific problem is that it is a rounding error inside a rounding error: the constituency that actually gets destroyed by a 90 percent deduction cap is high-volume professionals, and there are maybe a few thousand of them in the country. The recreational player who loses $3,000 a year barely notices. The pro who cycles eight figures through buy-ins can book a losing year and owe. That is the group with the least political weight and the loudest podcast, which is a bad combination for getting a tax provision reversed. Titus is now on her second strategy, and the honest read is that the fix happens inside a larger tax package or it does not happen.
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The GGPoker WSOP Online series opens in six days with 33 bracelets, and the headline guarantee figure depends on which outlet you read. Card Player reported 'over $69 million in guarantees.' PokerNews, poker.org and PokerNewsDaily all reported 'over $66 million.' Nobody has published a reconciliation. What every source agrees on: the series runs August 16 to September 29, the $5,000 Main Event carries a $25 million guarantee, and GGPoker is adding $5 million in promotional value on top. The Main Event structure is now clear and it is enormous: 19 separate Day 1 flights beginning August 16, funneling to a single Day 2 on September 21. Event #12, the $1,500 Millionaire Maker on August 31, guarantees $5 million with at least $1 million to the winner. The $500 Mini Main Event also guarantees $5 million. The $5 million in promotions includes Continental Flipouts, in which every player is sorted into one of four global regions and a flipout tournament worth up to $250,000 fires after each bracelet event for players from the winner's region, plus the $30,000 Super Pass to the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event for all 33 bracelet winners and nation-based freerolls for the top ten countries on the bracelet leaderboard.
Why it mattersThe $3 million discrepancy is not a scandal, it is almost certainly a question of whether the $5 million in added promotional value gets counted inside the guarantee total or outside it, and $66 million plus part of the promo bucket lands close enough to $69 million to explain it. But nobody has said so, and the guarantee number is the single most-repeated fact about this series. When four outlets publish two different figures on the flagship marketing claim and the operator does not clarify, that is worth noting before the series that will be judged on whether it made its guarantees. The 19 Day 1 flights are the more consequential detail. Nineteen entry points over five weeks feeding a single Day 2 is a structure engineered specifically to make a $25 million guarantee unmissable, because a player who busts flight three has sixteen more chances. Which means the guarantee is now much harder to fail and correspondingly less interesting as a test. The number to watch on September 21 is not whether $25 million gets covered. It is the total entry count, and whether re-entries or unique players are doing the covering.
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We went looking for ring winners this morning and found nothing. The WSOP Circuit at Harrah's Cherokee opened Thursday, August 6 and runs to August 17. WSOP.com's news page has not posted a single item since the August 6 series announcement. The operator's own tournament results page at wsop.com/tournaments/2026-wsop-circuit-harrah-s-cherokee currently serves the February 2026 Cherokee stop, not the one running right now, and that February page is complete: eighteen events, every winner named, every entry count and prize pool listed, Maxwell Guo taking the $1,700 Main Event with 1,824 entries for a $2,487,213 pool. So the infrastructure works. It has simply not been pointed at the series in progress. Card Player has the summer schedule listed. PokerOrg has a live updates page. No individual event winner from the August 6 to 10 window appears in any source we checked, and we are not going to name one we have not verified.
Why it mattersThis is the fifth day of a twelve-day series with a $2 million guaranteed Main Event, and the last WSOP hardware that will be awarded anywhere on earth before the online series fires on the 16th is coming out of this room. Somebody won a gold ring in North Carolina on Thursday. Somebody won one Friday, and Saturday, and yesterday. Their names are not published anywhere a normal person can find them. Compare that to February, when the same venue got a complete public results grid, and the difference is not capability, it is attention. The WSOP is currently in the post-Main-Event trough where the marketing department has moved on to selling Paradise packages, and the players grinding $400 events in Cherokee are the ones eating the cost of that in the form of a ring win nobody can look up. If the hardware is supposed to mean something, and WSOP.com's own boilerplate says it is 'a permanent record that you are a champion,' the record has to actually exist.
One real elimination worth logging, from the Gateway Poker Classic Main Event in St. Louis. Everything else in poker today happened on a spreadsheet.
Called off 13,000,000 with pocket sevens against Brett Hagopian's king-eight after Hagopian had shoved roughly every button for twenty minutes. King on the flop, tournament over. Because of the six-way ICM chop, Miller's runner-up payout was smaller than what third, fourth and fifth received.
Called all in for 1,200,000 with ace-six against jack-five and lost to a river straight. Made more money than the man who finished ahead of him.
Started the day as chip leader and bubbled the final table, calling off his last 1,030,000 on the river with a pair of jacks into Greg Iken's two pair.
Leads Card Player's overall 2026 race with five titles, twelve final tables and $4,229,256 in POY winnings. He is third in the WSOP's own POY race, 29 back of Deeb. Two boards, two answers, same year. Also a Poker Royalty stablemate of the world champion as of this weekend.
Still leads the official WSOP race at 3,410 points, 22 clear of Kihara. Card Player has him 22nd overall with 3,910 points and $1,230,312. The gap between those two rankings is the whole argument about what a POY race is supposed to measure. WSOP leaderboard still had not visibly refreshed with Main Event points in our sources, now a fourth consecutive brief flagging it.
Second-highest POY winnings in Card Player's top 50 and 33rd in points, on one title and two final tables. Worth 3,300 Card Player POY points and 1,550 PokerGO Tour points, the latter putting him straight into the PGT top ten. Money and points are not the same currency and this is the cleanest illustration anyone will get.
The Circuit record-holder is ranked above Adrian Mateos, Isaac Haxton and the reigning world champion on a bankroll smaller than what several of them made in a single tournament. If POY is supposed to reward playing well and often rather than running hot once, Hawkins at 14 is the system doing its job.
Eighteen final tables and $6,311,668, more POY winnings than the leader and 274 points behind him. Three titles to Foxen's five, which is the entire margin.
A Granite City police officer whose career live earnings were $94,000 before last night. Won a 705-entry Main Event and took the biggest slice of a six-way ICM chop. Says he will be back when RunGood returns to St. Louis in October.