Galfond Wins His Second WSOP Gold Bracelet
Phil Galfond, one of the finest poker players in the community, has won the second World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet of his career after emerging as the winner of the $10k buy-in NL Deuce-to-Seven Draw Lowball tournament. He also won the first place prize of $224,383.
The tournament had attracted a 77-strong field, which though small, was full of the best professional poker players. Most of them played all poker variants with ease, specialized in mixed poker games, and had a penchant for the Deuce-to-Seven Lowball. However, only 14 of them would finish in the cash, and among those were Mike Watson, Rep Porter, Jorryt van Hoof, George Danzer, and others. When all these players were eliminated, the final table of six players was set.
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Erik Seidel and Eli Elezra were eliminated in the fourth and sixth places, respectively. When Dan Smith was eliminated in the third place, Nick Schulman and Galfond were left playing the title, the pot, and the bracelet.
Ultimately, Galfond defeated Schulman in the heads-up match. The game had given Schulman another opportunity to win a tournament that he had won in 2009 as well as in 2012, an impressive feat that had established him as one of the world’s best NL Deuce-to-Seven Lowball players.
Schulman began in the lead, but Galfond soon pulled ahead of him. The heads-up match lasted two hours, at the end of which Galfond bagged the second WSOP bracelet of his career. After winning the tournament, Galfond said that his opponents played very well and that his victory meant a lot to him as he had to play against some of the top poker players in the world.
He later told WSOP.com: “When we were shorthanded, everybody’s so good. Normally in tournaments you tend to sort of shy away from spots because there are going to be better situations to get your money in.”
Stating that he was quite confident about his poker abilities right from the start, he said: “In a field this tough, you can’t have a huge edge. But I felt pretty good going in and throughout the tournament.”
Deuce-to-Seven Lowball is a poker variant that enjoys a great deal of popularity among professional poker players. The variant challenges players to create the lowest possible hand or 2-3-4-5-7 and is played in the Limit as well as No Limit formats. Galfond said that it is “probably the purest form of poker” he knows of.
