My WSOP 2025 Tournament - As Seen Through Texts!
This past June, I travelled to Las Vegas to participate in one of the more popular World Series of Poker events. Today I’m going to share my experience playing the tournament, mainly through the eyes of the text messages that I sent my family while playing. It provides a unique view into the tournament experience that I hope you’ll enjoy.
The WSOP Dream
Even though I’m just a recreational player, I have the same aspirations as professional poker players in terms of the desire to win a World Series of Poker bracelet. The only difference between me and the pros, aside from the slight difference in skill level, is that I can’t really afford to play more than one WSOP tournament (both because of funds and time off).
I’m also exclusively a cash game player, although I have played a handful of tournaments, primarily home-based, over the years. I’ve been exposed to terms like ICM, but my knowledge is very superficial (enough to make me dangerous as they say). The only thing I read about tournament poker that ever fully stuck was the guidance to shove or fold with 10bb’s or less.
My hesitation with tournament poker is the frustration that comes with walking away with nothing after hours of play (or even days when it comes to the WSOP) without showing anything for it. And I’m very aware of the low win rate that comes with tournament poker, especially for someone at my skill level. Low tournament volume compounds things, because less tournaments means less chances of cashing.
Why Do We Even Play These Things?
Tournament play reminds me of the Skinner rat experiments I learned about in psychology class at university. For those not familiar with Skinner or the experiments, it basically involved rats in a cage getting food pellets when they hit a lever (studying reinforced behavior). Skinner found that the rats pushed the lever more frequently and aggressively when the pellet distribution was random (vs. them getting pellets after every push). I think this is the same phenomenon we see with tournaments, with the random cash representing the random pellet distribution. For the record, I’m not calling anyone a rat and Skinner’s findings have been shown to translate to human behavior, so don’t shoot the messenger.
My Previous WSOP Experience
2025 marked my third WSOP trip to Las Vegas. My first WSOP experience was back in 2015, when I participated in the very first Colossus tournament. I didn’t last very long (maybe a couple of hours), but I knew that it was an experience I would eventually want to repeat. Unfortunately, life, family and work got in the way over the next several years and so many years passed without a return trip.
Fast forward to last year (2024) and I decided it was time to commit to my dream of trying to win a bracelet. After all, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. I had spent the previous year playing $1/$2 at Texas Card House and had made enough to pay for a trip to Vegas, including a tournament buy-in. Like my 2015 Colossus experience, I did not last very long (barely 1 hour). Even worse, and I won’t pretend there is any correlation, I had COVID while I was there. I can tell you from personal experience that having COVID and losing poker sessions are not a great combination.
WSOP 2025
Once again, I had squeezed out enough winning sessions at Texas Card House since my 2024 trip to fund another WSOP adventure. I tried to do a lot of research on what tournament I wanted to play and narrowed it down to the Millionaire Maker and Monster Stack. As a recreational player, I just intrinsically liked the idea of having a deeper stack. Truthfully, because of my very quick exits from the only other two WSOP tournaments I had played, I think I just wanted to increase my chances of lasting a bit longer on my third attempt. I knew from my research that deeper stacked tournaments actually favored the professionals (they could just pick you off), but I was okay with that. And so I ended up deciding to try the Monster Stack.
Monster Stack - Event #37
The Monster Stack tournament had four flights, with the first flight starting Wednesday, June 11th. I was only going to fire one bullet and my plan was to enter the fourth and final flight on Saturday, June 14th. Just to put things in perspective, I scheduled my return flight on the Monday, even though the tournament would have still been going on at that time. I figured that needing to change my flight because I was still in the tournament on the final day was a good problem to have.
In 2024, I scheduled my arrival in Vegas to occur the night before the fourth flight. That meant that I was forced to do registration and stuff that night, instead of relaxing. So this year I decided to fly in early on the 12th, giving me almost two full days in Vegas before the tournament. This proved to be a much better experience and allowed me to decompress and get mentally prepared. I just played cash at Bellagio (my favorite Vegas spot) Thursday and Friday. I also did everything I could to make sure I didn’t get COVID again (although I did end up getting it pretty soon after I returned home).
Here We Go - Playing the Monster Stack!
Even though we’re now almost three months removed from the tournament, I’m able to provide a nice account of what happened because of the text message updates to my family preserved on my phone. I’m going to be including many screenshots of the actual messages so you can experience what I was going through first hand.
The tournament started at 10am with a 50k starting chip stack and blinds at 100-200 with a 200 ante (150bb, not taking into account the 200 ante). Things were being run a bit differently this year as a result of of GGPoker acquiring the WSOP in 2024. One big change was the introduction of the WSOP+ app, which was a requirement for anyone playing in the WSOP. What was really cool about the app was that it showed your seat assignment/location as well as information about the other players at your table.
At 8:50am, I had the following text exchange with my family:
At 9:37am, I got my seat assignment via the WSOP+ app:
. 
What I didn’t appreciate at the time is that it was a fortunate table assignment for a couple of reasons. First, as the tournament goes on and players bust out, tables in certain sections/rooms are broken up first to fill out other tables/sections/rooms. The Black section of Paris is one of the pillar locations, meaning that our table was not going to be broken up at any point that day. This meant that we had the same players playing together for many hours, which I liked for multiple reasons:
- You get to really learn the other player’s playing styles;
- It fosters a much more social (and for me enjoyable) experience (it’s hard to ignore each other after several hours together with the same people). I would go so far as to way we even formed a table bond and cheered each other on when we eventually did end up at different tables.
The second reason that it was a lucky table assignment is because of the actual players at the table. As I mentioned, the new WSOP+ app allowed me to scope out the competition at my table and see their total tournament winnings. From initial seat assignments, there were only two people who caught my attention. The first was a younger female Asian player who had $100,000 in tournament winnings. The second was an older American player named Steven Rassi, who had $600,000 in tournament winnings. Those were big amounts to me (as someone with $0 tournament winnings), although I would come to learn that there were much bigger amounts to be worried about. In any event, neither of these players were to my immediate left, which was what I was most concerned with.
11:21am:
12:07pm:
I was returning to 200/400 blinds (133.75bb). No one from my table had been eliminated yet.
1:41pm: “Things have slowed down for me. Sitting at about 54k”.
1:51pm: “31 minutes left in level 4 and then we have another 20 minute break.”
2:23pm: “Okay just finished level 4 and I have 56,900”.
I was going to be returning to level 5, which was 300/600 blinds, meaning I was down to 94.83bb.
3:06pm:
3:53pm:
4:43pm:
7:05pm:
Given that my previous WSOP experience had lasted barely an hour, reaching the dinner break was a huge milestone for me and I started to believe that I might actually belong in the tournament.
Going into the dinner break I was sitting in 656th place out of 3,358 ‘Flight D’ entrants. I was heading into Level 9 with 1,000/1,500 blinds (62bb):
I only needed to last three more levels to survive Day 1!
Even though it was dinner break, I had a major decision on my hands and went into the tank before finally making a decision:
Play resumed around 8pm.
8:53pm: “Just lost a big one. Down to 50k :( “
9:14pm: “3 minutes left in this round. Then another round then a break and then one last round”.
It’s only now, writing this blog, that I’m noticing that I used the word ‘round’ instead of ‘level’. An interesting choice of word. Maybe it was subconscious, but 11 hours after the tournament start, it probably did feel like rounds (i.e. boxing).
10:18pm: “Well, survived (barely) to the break. Have 54k which is very low. After the break have one more level”.
10:21pm::
Level 11 was going to be 1,000/2,500, which meant that I only had 21.6bb. I was sitting in 1,122nd place out of 1,471 remaining players.
Level 11 started around 10:30pm Vegas time. My family was in Texas, which meant that it was already pretty late for them (12:30am). So that text at 10:21pm, saying I would have to go all-in soon, was the very last text they received from me that day (can you feel the suspense)…
At 8:10am the next morning (Sunday, June 15th), I sent my family the following text:
All told, there had been 9,920 entries between the four flights and 3,217 players had made it to day 2, including me!
My table assignment on Day 2 was a very different experience than Day 1 for a few reasons:
- I now had to deal with several bigger stacks;
- I was assigned to the Normandy room at the Horseshoe, which (i) felt like a dimly lit back room and (ii) would be one of the first to be broken up;
- A few of the players at the table seemed to be fairly accomplished tournament players with at least $600k in cashes:
The good news was that the biggest stack at the table (300k in chips to my 108k) was to my immediate right.
Day 2 was set to begin at 11am. With blinds getting big, there can be some crazy swings. Approximately 49 minutes after the start of Day 2 (11:49am), I informed my family that the big stack at the table had busted out! Fortunately, his demise came mostly at the expense of doubling up the two short stacks at the table, meaning that his chips were fairly distributed.
Over the course of the next 10 minutes, I provided the following summary of events:
At 12:14pm, I advised my family that I had doubled up. I think this is the only hand I actually have a breakdown of and it involved a Canadian player named Vadim Rozin ($697k in tournament winnings). He was sitting two seats to my left:
That brought me up to about 189k in chips. The funny thing about that hand is that I initially misread his hand. When he first flipped over his hand, I immediately saw the King and mistakenly thought he had the higher straight. I thought my chip stack was about to get demolished. But then I realized that he still needed the 10 (one of which I had) and prayed to not see that card on the river.
1:02pm: “Ok. Made first break. I have 203k. 2280 people left.”
2:30pm: “Been slowly chipping up. At 256k. 1,813 people left.”
Soon after, all the tables in the Normandy room were broken up. The table breaking process was quite funny. All of the players had to bag their chips. Then, like kindergartners in elementary school, we all had to form a single line behind one of the WSOP officials. We then walked in this single line all the way through the Horseshoe casino and into the Paris casino room (not a short walk). It must have been a peculiar sight for anyone in the casino who had never seen this before.
In any event, I was now back in Paris, which was a much nicer room. My excitement was brief after looking up the players at my new table and realizing that the player to my immediate right was a professional player named Timur Margolin who had career tournament winnings of almost 3 million. I was just extremely thankful that he was to my right.
3:45pm:
Interestingly, it seemed to be a theme during the tournament that I would often get involved in the hands leading into breaks.
Around that same time, I stated “Need 128 more people to bust and I’m in the money”
From that point on, everyone’s gaze became fixated on the right part of the screens showing the players who were left (1,614) and the number of places paid (1,488).
It was also at that time that I first learned about the concept of ‘tank folding’. A short stack at the table who was going to do everything he could to try and survive the bubble gave a public apology to the table and said he would be counting to 15 Mississippi every time it was on him. A few players at the table ended up joining him.
At 3:53pm, I told my family that I had lost a hand with AK and that I was card dead.
From then on, it just became a flurry of texts announcing how many players away we were from the money:
4:17pm: “75 people away from payouts”
4:21pm: “60 people away”
At this point, I was in survival mode as my stack had been dwindling down. I joined the tank folding group at the table.
4:24pm: “55 left”
4:29pm: “39 left”
4:41pm: “22 left. Did lose a bit when I called a raise with JJ and folded to bet on KQ flop” [those damn Jacks]
4:44pm: “12 people left”
4:59pm:
And added this brilliant piece of poker strategy:
And got this wonderful reassurance from my daughter:
Followed three minutes later by this:
5:17pm:
At that point, we were at Level 17 and Day 2 ended after 21 levels. The blinds were 5,000/10,000 and I had 130k (13bb). It would be another 500 player eliminations before the next pay jump (and even then, the pay jump was only $100).
5:37pm: “Okay down to 110k with blinds at 5/10k. It's now all in or nothing time”
5:49pm: "I need decent cards to go all in with. Down to 85k"
There were 1,235 players left in the tournament.
6:01pm: “Went all in and picked up the blinds. At 110k”
6:09pm: “Just picked up the blinds again. And blinds are 25k so not bad”
6:22PM:
I had made the Day 2 Dinner Break!
Play resumed at 7:36pm.
At exactly 9pm, after about 24 hours of tournament time, I sent the following text:
Not the worst scenario for a desperate short stack.
Final Thoughts
I ended up finishing in the top 10% of the Monster Stack field. Not a bracelet, but still extremely satisfying nonetheless, especially as a casual player playing just my third WSOP event. And it may sound cliche, but if I can do it, so can you. Best of all, when players assigned to my table next year look me up, they'll tremble with fear at my $3k+ tournament winnings :)
You definitely have to get lucky to go far in tournaments. But there are different variations of luck. On one hand, I consider it lucky that there were several spots where I pushed all in with flush draws without being called. But I think the luck you really need to win a tournament is that luck you get in giving someone a bad beat, winning when you should have lost. Although not mentioned earlier in this blog, I did experience this type of luck once in the tournament at some point on Day 1. I had QQ and ran into AA and spiked a Q on the runout. I did have my opponent covered at the time, but it would have been a very different trajectory had his aces held up. Amazingly, that is the only real lucky situation I encountered during my two days of play.
I mentioned earlier that players from my original table on Day 1 kind of formed a bond. Four of us from that very first table made it to day 2. And two of us made it to the payouts.
And just like the Skinner rats, this random reward of a min cash makes me want to keep pushing that WSOP tournament lever, even though I know that it’s more likely I will not cash than cash in any given tournament. But I finally understood the rush that tournament players get, which in turn fuels the desire to play more tournaments.
And now I just painstakingly wait until the 2026 tournament scheduled comes out (probably early February) so I can plan the next WSOP adventure. And depending on how I do in cash, I may even try to add a second tournament!
I want to hear from you! Comment below and let me know if you liked the blog…