Player of the Week: WSOP Deepstack King Ben Underwood
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Global Poker presents the Player of the Week. Every week during the 2019 WSOP, we’ll be choosing a player who has performed brilliantly at the tables at the 50th annual World Series of Poker. This week, that player is Ben Underwood.
The new WSOP bracelet deepstacks have proven to be insanely popular. More popular than even the WSOP likely had in mind, considering the monstrous combination of thousands of players plus tons of starting chips has resulted in most of them taking an extra day of play.
Given the staggering size of some of them — 6,000-plus players have turned out for some — just putting together one final table run would be an impressive feat for a poker player.
Three final tables, though?
That's truly unthinkable, and that makes Ben Underwood worthy of WSOP Player of the Week honors.
Final Tables Leading into Week Four
The first of the experimental new events, Event #9: $600 No-Limit Hold'em Deepstack, kicked off on June 3. Riding the coattails of the Big Fifty, it proved to be a harbinger of things to come as it drew a heaping pile of entries, 6,151 to be exact.
That meant a prize pool over $3.2 million, making the $500,000 guarantee look like someone's idea of a pointless joke.
A little-known Canadian player named Ben Underwood, with about $70,000 in cashes, was among those to make the dream run through the teeming masses and compete for the nearly $400,000 up top. Unfortunately for Underwood, an attempted stop-and-go when he was down to around 10 big blinds and flopped a gutshot failed as he ran into an opponent's top pair.
Underwood would settle for a still-handsome sum of $135,959 for fourth place. That smashed his old personal best of $22,536. Little did he know, a more lucrative summer than he could have realistically hoped for was just getting rolling.
A couple of weeks later, Underwood did it again. This time, it came in Event #37: $800 No-Limit Hold'em Deepstack, the second no-limit hold'em deepstack bracelet event of the summer.
In that one, Underwood navigated a more modest but still formidable 2,808 entries to the final table. There, he hung around for awhile in the middle of the pack before getting short and turning a straight out of the blinds in a limped pot. Unfortunately for the Canadian, it was no good as someone had flopped a full house and gotten lucky when Underwood's dead draw came in.
Underwood walked away with $74,435 for fifth place.
The Heat Continues
Kicking off a week filled with low buy-in events, Event #53: $800 No-Limit Hold'em Deepstack saw an uptick in numbers as 3,759 buy-ins were logged, almost quadrupling the $750,000 guarantee.
Amazingly, Underwood advanced to the final table yet again. This time, he was under 20 big blinds and had one of the shorter stacks. However, he didn't let that slow him down as he found an early double with kings over tens and turned his deepest run yet.
Four-handed play proved swingy as Underwood was at one point the shortest stack before making a charge and taking control of more than half of the chips going three-handed. His luck turned from there as he ran ace-king into ace-queen and then busted in a bit of an unlucky spot when his ace-nine suited couldn't hold against king-four suited.
Still, $168,960 for third is nothing to sneeze at.
Put it all together, and the numbers are a bit staggering. In total, Underwood turned $2,200 in entries — not counting possible reentries — into $379,354. That's a return on investment of 17,143 percent. Even early bitcoin adopters would have to be mildly impressed.
In a small twist of irony, there's a final live no-limit deepstack event, Event #59: $600 No-Limit Hold'em Deepstack Championship. However, registration ended mere minutes before Underwood busted in third place. That means, unless he registered on a break and let his stack blind off, the most successful player in the 2019 WSOP deepstacks was shut out of the Deepstack Championship.
Underwood will have to settle for comical ROI, three top-five finishes out of three live deepstacks and Global Poker Player of the Week honors.
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