Anthony Gregg Wins $4.8 Million In World Series Of Poker High Roller, Runs Over To Chip Stack Being Blinded Away In Another EventPoker Pro Wins First Career World Series Of Poker Bracelet |
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He started out at a young age playing cards competitively with Magic: The Gathering, and about a decade later used another form of card playing to capture $4.8 million and catapult himself into the spotlight of the gaming-for-real-money world.
Poker pro Anthony Gregg won the $111,111 buy-in “High Roller” event Saturday at the World Series of Poker, beating out an elite final table. It was his first career bracelet.
The Maryland native outlasted defending champ Antonio Esfandiari (fourth), veteran gambler Nick Shulman (eighth) and, at the end, nosebleed mixed-game pro Chris Klodnicki (second). The final table moved briskly, lasting just 80 hands. Many pots seemed excruciatingly standard.
Gregg’s massive score comes just one year after he staked Greg Merson for the $10,000 six-max and the main event, both of which the latter won. Gregg has netted untold millions from the World Series of the past couple of summers, and might be that span’s biggest winner.
Gregg’s performance was also a good example of how winning money in poker, no matter how much it is, is never quite good enough. Poker pros are motivated, in some sense, by a desire to win, in theory, every single dollar and every single chip that exists within the poker economy.
Despite playing for $4.8 million, he was essentially multi-tabling, live, at the Rio. The Maryland native also had a stack in the $25,000 six-max no-limit hold’em, but he had to just let it blind away while he competed for the “One Drop” title on Friday and Saturday.
When asked if he was trying to win all the money in the Rio, Gregg laughed and said: “I just like playing poker. There is only one $25,000 six-max this year, and had I busted the ‘One Drop’ five minutes after registration ended in the $25,000 I would have been really bummed.”
After winner photos and interviews were concluded, a disoriented Gregg started jogging, then sprinting, to try and find his $25,000 table. He was halfway down the hall in the Rio before realizing he was headed in the wrong direction. He stopped and backtracked, mistakenly going into the “Ladies Event” tournament area, before finally being given some concrete instructions on where the tournament he was entered in was playing.
When he finally got to his table, Gregg received some hugs and congratulations from his peers, but also a question on why he was playing another tournament right away, to which Gregg replied with a smirk on his face, “Gotta grind; gotta earn.” Despite the rush, Gregg ended up busting about an hour later, well before the event reached the money.
The day was also bizarre for Gregg since he and Klodnicki have basically the same group of poker friends and actually lived together in the same house last summer during the WSOP. So there wasn’t a whole lot of cheering for either player during their heads-up match.
“It was like whatever,” Gregg said of how their friends viewed the battle. It lasted just 19 hands, before Gregg’s 9
2
held against Klodnicki’s 7 5. All the money went in on a 9-4-3 flop.
Despite the “One Drop” feeling, in many ways, like just another tournament on Gregg’s schedule, it marked an accomplishment that is kind of surreal for him.
“I started playing in late 2002,” he once said. “Like many poker players, I used to play Magic: The Gathering when I was a kid, and I sort of graduated into poker. I started having a moderate amount of success during my senior year in high school, and didn’t have that much desire for college. So I decided to keep playing poker while I figured out what I wanted to do. I knew I’d be able to make good money doing it, but never imagined it would get to the level it did.”
Here are the final results:
1. Anthony Gregg — $4,830,619
2. Chris Klodnicki — $2,985,495
3. Bill Perkins — $1,965,163
4. Antonio Esfandiari — $1,433,438
5. Richard Fullerton — $1,066,491
6. Martin Jacobson — $807,427
7. Brandon Steven — $621,180
8. Nick Schulman — $485,029
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