The Muck · WSOP Daily Brief
Day 104 - The Correction Edition
Correction first, because it is also the lead. Yesterday this brief said no new WSOP bracelet had been reported anywhere since September 1. That was wrong. Card Player published a full report on September 2 naming Benjamin Rolle as the winner of the WSOP Online $1,500 Millionaire Maker, 5,518 entries, $1,366,929, his second bracelet. We were reading the wrong outlets. The same index also carried Matthew Higgins winning his tenth Circuit ring at Tunica on September 1, two months after he beat 22,811 entries in the $1,000 Mystery Millions for a bracelet and exactly $1,000,000. Two named champions, both public for days, neither in this brief until now. Put their numbers side by side and you get the actual story: a bracelet won against 22,811 people paid $1,000,000, a bracelet won against 5,518 people paid $1,366,929, and a ring won against 367 people paid $110,851. Field size and payout have come unstuck from each other entirely. Also today: Station Casinos has banned phones and card protectors from the felt in all four of its Las Vegas poker rooms, three players won two bracelets each this summer by our own count, and Poker.Org's canonical list of 2026 bracelet winners says the series ran until August 5. It ended July 15.
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Correction. Yesterday's brief stated that no new WSOP bracelet had been reported anywhere since the September 1 batch. Card Player published a full report by Erik Fast on September 2 at 17:19 UTC naming Benjamin Rolle, the German pro known online as 'bencb789,' as the winner of the 2026 WSOP Online $1,500 Millionaire Maker. Rolle topped 5,518 entries out of a $7,863,150 prize pool for $1,366,929 and his second career bracelet. It came less than a year after he beat 5,961 entries in the 2025 WSOP Online Main Event for a career-best $3,900,707. He is a CoinPoker ambassador and the founder of the Raise Your Edge training site, and the win takes his recorded live and online scores to roughly $6.8 million. The final hand: Rolle checked his option with queen-three of clubs, the flop came queen-eight-four with one club, the six of clubs turned, Rolle bet 4,500,000 into 6,700,000 and got a call, the king of clubs completed the board, Rolle led small, Loris Gauthier raised to 8.2 big blinds, Rolle jammed the flush, and Gauthier called off 14.2 big blinds with king-ten for top pair. Second place was worth $976,155. Rolle posted the result himself on X on September 1 and streamed the heads-up match. Card Player's headline rounds the win to $1.4 million while the article body carries $1,366,929; the tournament results table it links to carries the exact figure.
Why it mattersThe error is ours and it is the useful part. This brief has spent a week arguing that WSOP results go unpublished, and the thing that actually happened is that a seven-figure bracelet was published promptly by a major outlet and we did not see it because we were checking WSOP.com, PokerNews and Pokerfuse and not Card Player. That is a reporting failure, not an industry one, and it changes the shape of the complaint. The industry problem is real for live Circuit stops, where field sizes and ring winners genuinely are not being filed. It is not real for the GGPoker online series, which Card Player is covering event by event with full final tables. We have been running one criticism across both and it only fits one of them. From today the source list includes Card Player's news index by default.
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Matthew Higgins, 45, of Rossville, Georgia, won the 2026 WSOP Circuit Horseshoe Tunica $1,700 Main Event on September 1 for $110,851 and his tenth WSOP Circuit ring, three of which have now come in Circuit Main Events. He beat 367 entries out of a $556,005 prize pool that paid the top 41, defeating Daniel Garner heads-up. Two-time bracelet winner Yuval Bronshtein went out 15th, Nicholas Rigby eighth, and bracelet winner David Moses fifth. This was Higgins' tenth six-figure score and it pushed his career tournament earnings past $4 million. Two months earlier, at the summer series in Las Vegas, Higgins won Event #63, the $1,000 Mystery Millions, out of a field of 22,811 entries, for his first WSOP gold bracelet and exactly $1,000,000. Card Player has him 111th in the 2026 Player of the Year standings with 2,462 points from two wins and four final tables. Talking to Poker.Org reporters after the Tunica win, Higgins said he was trying to build something to leave his kids.
Why it mattersHiggins is the most interesting player in American poker right now and nobody outside Card Player has written a word about him in five days. The résumé he has assembled in 2026 is close to unrepeatable: the largest field in the history of the summer series and one of the smallest Main Event fields on the Circuit, in the same calendar year, for the same person. Ten rings puts him within range of the all-time list, and unlike most players chasing that number he has a bracelet and a million dollars to go with it. We noted yesterday that WSOP.com had listed the Tunica result and moved on. It deserved better than a line in a source note, including from us.
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Three 2026 WSOP results, all confirmed, all won inside ten weeks of each other. Matthew Higgins beat 22,811 entries in the $1,000 Mystery Millions and was paid $1,000,000. Benjamin Rolle beat 5,518 entries in the $1,500 WSOP Online Millionaire Maker and was paid $1,366,929. Higgins then beat 367 entries in the $1,700 Tunica Circuit Main Event and was paid $110,851. Rolle's field was roughly a quarter the size of Higgins' summer field and paid him 37 percent more. Higgins' Tunica field was about 1.6 percent the size of his Mystery Millions field and paid him about 11 percent of the money. The two bracelets came from fields four times apart in size with payouts within $370,000 of each other. Higgins' two 2026 titles, one bracelet and one ring, differ in field size by a factor of 62 and in prize money by a factor of nine.
Why it mattersThe intuitive version of a poker title is that the more people you beat the more you win, and in 2026 that relationship has essentially dissolved. What sets the payout is the buy-in and the guarantee structure, not the size of the crowd, which is why a $1,500 online event with a $7.86 million prize pool outpays a $1,000 live event with more than four times the entries. That is not a scandal, it is arithmetic, but it does hollow out the thing people actually mean when they say a title is impressive. Higgins beating 22,811 players is a far harder achievement than Rolle beating 5,518, and Rolle got paid more for it. Nobody has to fix this. It is just worth saying out loud that the number on the check has stopped being a measure of the field.
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Station Casinos has prohibited players from keeping phones or other electronics on the table at all of its Las Vegas poker rooms, per a September 1 report by Steve Schult at Card Player. Players may still use their phones, they just cannot rest them on the felt. At Boulder Station the room wrote the rule on a whiteboard: cellphones and other electronics are not allowed to be on the table, and card protectors are not allowed either. Station Casinos operates 17 properties in Southern Nevada with poker rooms at Red Rock Resort, Boulder Station, Santa Fe Station and Green Valley Ranch, the last of which reopened its room late last year. Card Player asked the Boulder Station poker room manager for comment and got no response. The stated reason is the camera-in-the-phone scam: in 2024 authorities arrested a pair cheating high-stakes games in Europe using a microscopic camera in the side of a phone laid flat on the table, reading cards under the dealer's pitch and relaying them to a confederate outside the casino via earpiece. Bart Hanson has said on the Crush Live Poker podcast that similar scams have been rumored in Southern California games. Separately, South Point has switched its dealers from the traditional pitch to the European slide method, which keeps cards on the felt and out of any camera's line of sight. Card Player notes there have been no confirmed reports of recent cheating in Las Vegas.
Why it mattersThis is two of the biggest non-Strip poker operators in Las Vegas changing physical procedure inside about a week, in response to a threat that by the reporting has not been confirmed to have arrived in Nevada. That is either commendable speed or a fairly loud statement about what operators privately think is happening. Either way the card protector ban is the part that will actually annoy players, and it is the part with no stated cheating rationale attached to it at all. Note also what has not happened: the WSOP, which runs the largest tournament series in the world across Caesars properties in the same city, has said nothing about phones on tables or dealing method, and the 2026 Circuit rulebook has not been revised in public. Four rooms in Las Vegas now have stricter electronics rules than the World Series of Poker does.
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Our own count, run today against Poker.Org's published list of all 100 bracelet winners from the 2026 summer series, so check our arithmetic. Three players won two bracelets each. Naoya Kihara of Japan took Event #17, the $10,000 No-Limit 2-7 Lowball Draw Championship, for $428,923, then Event #23, the $10,000 Seven Card Stud Championship, for $301,970, four days apart. Calvin Anderson won Event #48, the $10,000 Razz Championship, for $357,026, becoming the first player ever to win two $10,000 Razz Championships, then Event #54, the $10,000 HORSE, for $413,580, three days later. Eelis Paerssinen of Finland won Event #47, the $25,000 High Roller Pot-Limit Omaha, for $2,161,056 and Event #64, the $25,000 High Roller Mixed PLO/NLH, for $1,172,296. All six of those bracelets came in championship or high roller events at $10,000 or above. Not one of the three doubled up in an event under five figures. Separately, Kristen Foxen won Event #19 and Alex Foxen won Event #44, making them the second married couple to appear in the 2026 hardware ledger.
Why it mattersOne hundred events, three repeat winners, and every repeat came in the expensive mixed and high roller side of the schedule where the fields are smallest and the same eighty people keep sitting down. That is the clearest available picture of what the WSOP now is: a mass-participation lottery on one side of the room, a closed and beatable circuit on the other, and no overlap in who wins twice. Anderson's two in three days is the single most impressive stretch of the summer and it went almost entirely unremarked outside Poker.Org's own coverage. Also worth flagging for anyone building a POY argument: Paerssinen sits fifth in Card Player's overall standings and Anderson sits fortieth, despite Anderson having the rarer accomplishment, because the money is in the buy-in.
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Poker.Org's page titled '2026 WSOP winners: The full list' opens by stating that the World Series of Poker ran May 26 to August 5 at Paris and Horseshoe in Las Vegas, awarding gold bracelets across 100 live events. The 2026 series ended July 15. PokerNews' 2026 tour hub states plainly that the series ran May 26 through July 15 and closed with Event #100, the $1,000 Super Turbo, on July 15. Poker.Org's own list ends at Event #100 and its 2026 Main Event report has Lucas Jumalon winning on August 5, which is where the confusion presumably comes from: the final table was deliberately delayed this year in a revival of the November Nine format, so the Main Event finished three weeks after the series it belonged to. The page was published June 1 and last modified August 25, so the sentence has been sitting there through at least one edit pass. This is a different page from the stale WSOPC Tulsa Instant hub we wrote about yesterday, and a different kind of error: not out of date, just wrong.
Why it mattersThis is a small thing and we would not run it except that this page is the reference document. It is the most complete public list of the 100 champions of the 2026 World Series of Poker, it is the page search engines return, it is where we got the Higgins Mystery Millions figure and the repeat-winner count in the story above, and it is published by the WSOP's contracted Circuit media partner. The list itself checks out everywhere we have been able to test it. The sentence describing when the thing happened does not. Poker.Org should fix the date and keep the list, which remains the best resource of its kind in poker.
Correcting yesterday. We reported that no new bracelet had been named since September 1. Benjamin Rolle won the WSOP Online $1,500 Millionaire Maker on September 1 and Card Player reported it in full on September 2. The GGPoker international series runs August 16 to September 29 with 33 bracelet events and every winner taking a $30,000 Super Pass to the $25,000 WSOP Paradise Super Main Event and its $50 million guarantee. The Main Event carries a $25 million guarantee on September 21. We are no longer confident in the running 13-of-33 count we have been carrying, because we have now demonstrably missed at least one published winner, so we are not repeating it today. On the live side, Matthew Higgins' tenth ring at Tunica on September 1 is the most recent named Circuit winner we can verify outside the six Playground names already reported.
Second career bracelet for 'bencb789,' less than a year after winning the 2025 WSOP Online Main Event over 5,961 entries for $3,900,707. Total prize pool $7,863,150, top eight all six figures. Beat Loris Gauthier heads-up with a river flush. Takes a $30,000 Super Pass to WSOP Paradise. Career recorded scores now around $6.8 million.
Tenth WSOP Circuit ring, third in a Circuit Main Event. Rossville, Georgia, age 45. Came two months after he beat 22,811 entries in Event #63, the $1,000 Mystery Millions, for his first bracelet and $1,000,000. Career earnings now past $4 million. Prize pool $556,005, top 41 paid.
Included because our repeat-winner count today makes it relevant and nobody has run it. Anderson became the first player ever to win two $10,000 Razz Championships, then took the $10,000 HORSE three days later. Sits 40th in the Card Player POY standings with 3,320 points. Not a new result; carried for context on story #5.
Two real final tables today, both from results we should have carried earlier in the week. The Millionaire Maker ladder is the deepest published WSOP payout structure of the last seven days and every one of these eliminations happened at a bracelet final table. The Tunica names are the current WSOP Circuit Main Event record. These are genuine results, not the March reference table we used yesterday for want of anything current.
Called off his last 14.2 big blinds with king-ten for top pair on a king-high board against Benjamin Rolle's rivered club flush. Held an 8-to-3 chip lead on the first hand of heads-up play and lost the lead to quad tens shortly after.
Third of 5,518. The gap between his finish and Rolle's is $669,777.
The only player at the final table not to earn six figures, short by $7,410. Rolle came back to nine-handed play with 127.3 big blinds, twice the next stack.
Lost heads-up to Matthew Higgins and his tenth ring. A $36,027 gap between first and second in a 367-entry field.
A WSOP bracelet winner finishing fifth in a 367-runner Circuit Main. Two-time bracelet winner Yuval Bronshtein went out 15th in the same event.
Eighteen points, exactly as it was on September 4 and September 5. Wilson has three titles and 20 final tables to Foxen's five and 12. Nothing published anywhere in the last 72 hours has been eligible to move either number. We ran the full board on September 4 and are not repeating it.
The number nobody is discussing. Punsri has 23 final tables, more than anyone in the top ten, and $6,229,867 in POY winnings. He is closer to first than Foxen is to third. If this race is decided at WSOP Paradise in December as the WSOP has said its own race will be, Punsri is the live one.
Two wins from four final tables in 2026, one of them a gold bracelet from a 22,811-entry field, and he sits outside the top 100. A useful illustration of what the Card Player formula actually rewards, which is buy-in size and volume at the top end rather than field size.
Won a WSOP gold bracelet and $1,366,929 on September 1 and does not appear anywhere in Card Player's top 50 overall standings as read today. Consistent with everything we have found about online bracelets and the POY races, and still nobody at Card Player or the WSOP has stated the rule in public.