“I’ve been running solid – I won one of those Sunday $10,000s the other day, and I’m playing well, as well as I can,” Haines said.

And while there was some debate as to how the prize would be awarded, Owen elected to give the seat to Haines, the runner-up.Īs he set out to fly to Las Vegas with his wife, Haines was in good spirits. With a World Championship seat on the line for the winner, and a $2,500 bounty for eliminating the freshly minted WPT Ambassador, Owen did the unthinkable and beat out the entire field. That’s what led him to sign up for a free one-month trial to ClubWPT, just in time for Owen’s freeroll event.

Haines did retain one significant connection to poker, though – watching Brad Owen’s vlogs. Recently, Haines has been flying part-time in Colorado, where his brother lives. He’s been a pilot for 23 years, with experience in both commercial and cargo flights, with a few years of hiatus during the poker boom. He played mostly single-table tournaments on PokerStars and PartyPoker, and even won his way into the 2006 World Series of Poker main event – to date, the largest poker tournament prize pool in history – and finished about 100 spots outside of the money.īut Haines had long since left playing poker seriously in his rear-view mirror. “I hadn’t played poker in, I don’t know, 8 to 10 years – especially not full-time or anything.”īilly Haines had taken poker pretty seriously in the early-to-mid 00s. One of them played in the Brad Owen WPT World Championship Bounty event, and finished second in the 2,154-player field – to Owen himself.Īnother played through an entire season of events to become the 2022 ClubWPT Player of the Year.Īnd one of the last to win their way in did so by out-driving Phil Ivey in a golf simulator.Īhead of each player starting their journey in this event on Day 1B Tuesday, we checked in with these three qualifiers to find out more about their journey and how they’re feeling ahead of the opportunity of a lifetime. And even with the ClubWPT ecosystem, there were several different paths to the WPT World Championship. These players hail from all over the United States, from Alaska all the way south to Florida. Casinos and card rooms, both physical and digital, ran satellites and contests over the last few months that will likely help make this $10,400 buy-in tournament one of the biggest in the history of poker.ĬlubWPT offered a variety of opportunities for more than two dozen players to enter this event. Poker players from all over the world won their way into the WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas, which kicked off Monday afternoon.

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