WSOP Event #17

World Series of Poker Event #17, No Limit Hold’em Shootout, 8-10 June 2008

Entrants: 1,000
Buy in: $1,500
Prize pool: $1,365,000

Final results:

1. Jason Young $335,565

2. Mike Schwartz $209,527

3. John Strzemp III $129,675

4. Rory Monahan $82,582

5. Matthew Giannetti $40,267

6. Kyle Bowker $23,887

7. Sergey Rybachenko $15,697

8. Thomas West $12,421

9. Alexander Triner $9,828

The $1,500 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em Shootout attracted 1,000 entrants. The total prize pool amounted to $1,365,000. The top 100 finishers collected prize money.

Attendance for this event increased over last year’s number, when 900 players registered.

The winner was Jason Young, from Suffern, NY. He is a 26-year-old aspiring professional poker player.

Young recently left his job to pursue playing poker for a living. In his prior job, he worked for six years for the Parks and Recreation Department, involved in various community projects.

Young collected $329,872 for first place. He remarked afterward: “When I worked as a recreation coordinator, I made $35,000 a year. Now, I just made ten years of my former salary in just two days!”

This was unquestionably the most dramatic final table of the WSOP thus far. Young’s victory almost did not happen. In fact, his cagey opponent – Mike Schwartz – nearly pulled off the greatest recorded comeback in WSOP history.

When playing heads-up Schwartz lost a huge pot and was down about 40 to 1 in chips. He had only 140,000 of the 10,000,000 chips in play (1.4 percent) with his big blind posted at 120,000. Incredibly, Schwartz won several hands over the next hour and was all-in down only about 7 to 3 in chips, holding the best hand.

Had he won the final hand of the tournament, Schwartz would have been at a 3 to 2 advantage in heads-up play.

The curse on defending champions continues. Donald Baruch won this event in 2007. He entered the tournament this year, but did not cash. This marks the 17th straight time where a defending champion failed to cash in his or her respective event.

All WSOP images are supplied by “IMPDI for the 2008 WSOP”