Former Pro Gamer Jinho Hong Wins World Series of Poker Hall of Fame Bounty Event

The $1,979 Poker Hall of Fame bounty event was first introduced at the 2021 World Series of Poker. The event drew a positive response from players and fans, and was brought back in 2022. The unusual buy-in price point stems from the year the fact that Hall of Fame was established in 1979. A second noteworthy feature of this tournament is that Hall of Fame members who participated each sported a bounty that corresponded to the year they were inducted. For example, 2011 inductee Barry Greenstein had a $2,011 bounty on his head that Jakob Miegel earned for knocking Greenstein out in 36th place. Greenstein was the last Hall of Fame member standing in this event.

This year’s running attracted a field of 865 total entries, building a prize pool of $1,495,363. After three days of action, South Korea’s Jinho Hong emerged victorious with the title and the top prize of $276,067. The former professional StarCraft player, known to many in that world as ‘YellOw’, earned his first bracelet as the champion of this event.

This win came two weeks after Hong took down the $3,500,000 guaranteed $3,500 buy-in event at the Wynn Summer Classic for a career-high payday of $696,011. With these two huge scores, Hong now has more than $1.3 million in career earnings to his name.

“For now I’m so happy, my head is empty, very nervous but I am just so grateful that I’ve won a bracelet,” he told WSOP reporters after coming out on top. “The win at the Wynn Summer Classic was a bigger cash but for me, the bracelet is a lot more meaningful to me and hopefully in the future, a lot more Koreans keep on trying to get the bracelet and hopefully our country grows.”

In addition to the hardware and the money, Hong also scored 912 Card Player Player of the Year points as the champion of this event. Thanks to his two victories in recent weeks, he now sits in 35th place in the 2022 POY race standings, which are presented by Global Poker.

Plenty of big names joined the aforementioned Greenstein in making deep runs in this event, including Adam Hendrix (18th – $8,863), bracelet winner Yueqi Zhu (14th – $10,700), three-time bracelet winner Georgios Sotiropoulos (13th – $13,139), and five-time bracelet winner Shaun Deeb (12th – $13,139).

The final day began with Hong in front with just seven players remaining. Action was fast and furious out of the gate. Not long after cards in the air, Hong scored a double knockout when his A-Q beat out the A-J of George Rotariu (7th – $35,164) and the pocket fives of two-time bracelet winner Yuri Dzivielevski (6th – $46,791). This was Dzivielevski’s eighth final-table finish of the year. As a result, he surged up the rankings and into 19th place on the POY leaderboard.

Pavel Spirins (5th – $63,225) was the next to fall, with his A-9 failing to outrun the K-Q suited of bracelet winner and two-time World Poker Tour champion Daniel Weinman. A king on the flop gave Weinman the lead right away, but running diamonds saw him playing a king-high flush to drag the pot and narrow the field to four.

Weinman soon found himself on the other side of that equation. Punnat Punsri shoved from the small blind and Weinman called from the big blind with A9. Punsri’s QJ imrpvoed to a pair of jacks on the turn and held from there to send Weinman to the rail in fourth place ($86,730). This was his third final table of the series, including his win in the $1,000 pot-limit Omaha eight max event earlier this summer. He currently sits in second place in the WSOP POY standings.

Punsri added to his stack when his pocket kings held up against the pocket tens of Jakob Miegel with all of the chips going in preflop. Miegel earned $120,756 for his third-place finish.

With that, Punsri took 14,760,000 into heads-up play against Hong, who held 11,190,000. Hong scored a crucial double-up, getting all-in with top pair and an ace kicker against the same pair and a king kicker for Punsri. Hong avoided a king on the turn and river to double into a nearly 25:1 lead. Punsri managed his own double-up, but was soon all-in and at risk again. He had picked up AA, giving him a dominant lead over the A4 of Hong. The board ran out Q4627 to crack Punsri’s aces with a flush for Hong.

Punsri earned $170,615 as the runner-up finisher. This was the second-largest score of his career, behind only the $593,481 he earned as the third-place finisher in the $50,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em high roller event that wrapped up just over a month earlier. The Thai player now has more than $1.4 million in recorded earnings.

Here is a look at the payouts and rankings points awarded at the final table:

Winner photo credit: WSOP / Danny Maxwell.

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