The World Series of Poker has ended in Europe, and all 15 gold bracelets have their rightful owners. Despite the lack of global media coverage of the festival, it attracted a record number of participants, at least in the Main Event, and Ukrainian poker players showed good results, despite the small number of players in Rozvadov.
The greatest success was achieved by Ruslan Volkov. He made it to the final table with a decent amount of chips. In one hand, he had pocket tens against an ace-high, but his opponent caught the ace on the turn. This win was the largest in the Ukrainian’s career. The previous record was $115,000 won in the Merit Poker Retro Series Main Event.
The winner was Max Neugebauer from Austria. Although he is not a professional, his story is familiar to many famous poker pros: Max was a professional basketball player, representing Austria until the age of 18, after which he played for the Vienna team in the Austrian Bundesliga. However, Max had health problems, due to which he was forced to leave the sport:
“I had huge problems with my knees. When I stopped playing basketball, I switched to poker. For me, only the competitive part was really important, as well as working on the game. I felt like there was some kind of void that needed to be filled. And poker filled it,”
Max commented.
In Rozvadov, Marx tried to get a satellite ticket, but there was no cheap way to get into the Main Event, so Neugebauer immediately bought a ticket. Taking first place, Max won his first gold bracelet, €1.5 million in prize money and became the world poker champion.
