This week’s poker news has a keen focus on the 2021 World Series of Poker. Three big winners added to their bank accounts and hardware, and we’ve got the latest headlines.
Cates Wins 2021 $50,000 Poker Players Championship
Dan Cates had himself a phenomenal day at the World Series of Poker, emerging victorious in the $50,000 buy-in Poker Players Championship. Cates is well known in the poker world for playing in high-stakes cash games. He entered this event with a big buy-in and defeated all 63 other entries in order to win the top prize of $954,020 and his first-ever gold bracelet.
Despite this being his first wrist bling at the WSOP, it certainly wasn’t his first career poker tournament win. Cates has eclipsed over $9 million in career tournament earnings so far and he is still just 31 years old. Cates has won in both the World Poker Tour Alpha8 and the Triton Poker series on top of that.
In addition to all of that money and a brand-new bracelet, he picked up 612 Card Player Player of the Year points for his win. It was his first qualifying score for the race, so he isn’t very high up in the standings as of right now.
Arieh Claims Fourth World Series of Poker Bracelet
Josh Arieh just can’t be stopped right now. The poker pro competed in the $10,000 pot-limit Omaha hi-lo championship and overcame a large 208 entry field to win the gold bracelet on top of the $484,791 in tournament winnings. Coincidentally, he was able to win this event right as another event finished one besides him, an event that he just busted in the previous day.
Arieh also competed in the $50,000 Poker Players Championship two days prior to this big win and while he wasn’t able to win it all, he did make an appearance at the final table. He came in sixth place in that event and earned $161,422. Arieh also won another gold bracelet shortly just over two weeks ago during the $1,500 pot-limit Omaha event.
He has now catapulted up into 70th place in the Card Player Player of the Year standings with his pickup of 900 points.
Sotiropoulos Picks Up Third Gold Bracelet
Georgios Sotiropoulos was one step ahead of the competition this week as he snagged his third career gold bracelet at the World Series of Poker. The Greek native competed in the $1,000 mini main event at the WSOP and he overcome a ridiculously large field of 3,821 other entries. Not only that, Sotiropoulos had to knock off Wataru Miyashita in heads-up in order to cement his win.
The victory netted him $432,575 and will go down as the second-largest recorded tournament score in his career so far. The only score he has had bigger than this one was back in 2013 during the European Poker Tour when he netted himself $957,180 for a runner-up finish.
His first bracelet victory came back in 2015 during the WSOP Europe and his second came a few years after that during the WSOP Online international series.