Jay Kwon wins Razz Event and first WSOP bracelet

The 2018 season of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas has seen very few top names earning the big bucks, but quite a few new winners being crowned every day. Similarly, it was USA’s Jay Kwon who won his first ever WSOP gold bracelet yesterday, after having only 9 live tournament cashes in a career spanning 10 years.

Kwon earlier cashed out in the Colussus Event for $2,048 and his win yesterday turned out to be not just his first gold bracelet, but also his first ever live poker title, shipping Event #50: $1,500 Razz and taking home a career-best $125,431 for first place. Prior to this, Kwon had less than $50k in live poker cashes.

Razz is not a very popular format of the game of poker and after cashing out in WSOP Razz events in 2011 and 2016 and then shipping this tournament, Kwon can rightly call himself a ‘Razz specialist’ now. He beat Poland’s Dzmitry Urbanovich in heads up, who is another mixed game specialist with over $5 million in live cashes.

“Razz is like my favourite game, and I feel like it’s an underappreciated game and people get frustrated at it. But I love the game and yeah, this means more to me than a lot of tournaments. I started playing it and it was really interesting, so I kind of got into it and just started playing it a lot. I’m somewhat of a Razz specialist,” said Kwon after this Razz victory.

Final table results:

Jay Kwon – $125,431
Dzmitry Urbanovich – $77,526
Adam Owen – $52,536
Michael McKenna – $36,324
Kevin Iacofano – $25,637
Thomas Taylor – $18,477
Jeff Mitseff – $13,605
Jeanne David – $10,240
Kyle Montgomery – $7,881

The event drew a total of 389 entries which created a prize pool of slightly over half a million dollars, proving that this format of the game is not very popular among the top poker pros of the world. However, it was still a pretty big accomplishment by Kwon and you can get similar poker success stories here on GutshotMagazine.com!