Isaac Haxton has kicked 2023 off in style, taking down the two largest buy-in events held so far this year within a few days of each other. Just four days removed from his win in the $50,000 buy-in PokerGO Cup finale for $598,000, Haxton emerged victorious in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $100,000 buy-in super high roller event with the title and $1,082,230.
Haxton is no stranger to success in the Bahamas, having finished as the runner-up in the 2007 PCA main event for $861,789 back when it was part of the World Poker Tour.
This latest victory marked the sixth time that Haxton has cashed for seven figures in a poker tournament. He now has just shy of $33.5 million in career earnings, good for 15th place on poker’s all-time money list.
Haxton has already cashed for $1,680,230 this year, the most of any player on the circuit. His two victories have also seen him accrue 906 Card Player Player of the Year points, enough to move him into 10th place in the 2023 POY race standings presented by Global Poker.
While Haxton secured the title in this event, he actually came away with the second-most prize money. The final three in this event struck a deal, with four-time bracelet winner Adrian Mateos securing the highest payout of $1,095,903 while WPT champion Seth Davies locked up $1,078,347.
“We got down to three players left in the tournament and we got to the stacks being almost identical. Seth and Adrian are both players I have an enormous amount of respect for. I think they are really, really good. So rather than gambling for nearly a million dollar difference between third and first, we decided to split up the money,” Haxton told PokerStars reporters when asked about the deal.
This event played out over the course of three days at the new location of the resurrected PokerStars Caribbean Adventure: the Baha Mar Resort & Casino in Nassau. The PCA was last held in 2019 at the former venue of Atlantis Resort on nearby Paradise Island, which is located just off the coast from Nassau on New Providence Island in The Bahamas. The series was held there for a decade and a half, but was scrapped in 2020.
The renewed series kept with the old tradition of featuring a $100,000 buy-in super high roller event in the early days of the festival. This year saw 49 entries made, building a prize pool of $4,753,980. The tournament took three days to complete, with the money bubble bursting late on day 2 with the elimination of British poker pro Ben Heath in ninth place. Canadian tournament star Timothy Adams (7th – $249,600) was the first player eliminated inside the money, with his J-6 suited unable to come from behind against the K-Q suited of Davies.
The final day began with WPT champion and 2016 PCA main event champion Mike Watson in the lead with six contenders remaining. A severally short-stacked Daniel Dvoress was the first to be sent to the rail, with his last big blind or so going in with K-5 facing the A-8 of Spanish poker pro Juan Pardo. Dvoress failed to improve and was eliminated in sixth place ($320,900).
Watson had a huge bluff picked off by Pardo during five-handed play that saw him plunge down the leaderboard. He fell to below ten big blinds not long after that, and eventually got all-in with K-10 trailing the A-10 of Haxton. Ace high played in the end and Watson settled for $404,100 as the fifth-place finisher.
Despite winning that sizable pot off of Watson, Pardo was the next player to be eliminated. He ran a bluff attempt of his own with a busted straight draw, only to find that Davies had rivered queens full of jacks with his pocket queens. Pardo then doubled up a short-stacked Mateos to further slide down the standings. His run in this event ended when his A-Q clashed with the A-K of Haxton. Neither player improved on a jack-high runout and Pardo was knocked out in fourth place ($522,900).
Three-handed play began with Haxton out in front. At first he expanded that lead, but Davies and Mateos battled back to the point that the three were all within a few big blinds of each other when they decided to strike the three-way deal discussed earlier. The agreement left just the title and the trophy to play for, with the entirety of the remaining prize money being apportioned based on the ICM numbers. They also agreed to increase the blinds and shorten the levels to just ten minutes in length to speed up the process of deciding a champion.
.jpg "Seth Davies and Isaac Haxton")
Despite earning the largest payout, Mateos was the first to fall after the deal was done. He ran K-J suited into the A-Q suited of Haxton, who had regained the lead in the interim, and was unable to come from behind. The $1,095,903 he earned as the third-palce finisher increased his career earnings to more than $31.8 million, putting him one spot behind Haxton on the all-time money list at 16th. He also earned 400 POY points for his fourth POY-qualified final-table finish of the year. He now sits in seventh place in the overall standings as a result.
Davies soon followed when his Q
3 shove from the button for around 12 big blinds was looked up by Haxton’s J
8. The board ran out J
9
65K and Haxton made a pair of jacks to win the pot and the title.
Davies’ $1,078,347 payday from the deal was the largest of his career. He now has more than $19.1 million in recorded cashes to his name.
Here is a look at the payouts and POY points awarded in this event:
| Place | Player | Earnings | POY Points |
| 1 | Isaac Haxton | $1,082,230 | 600 |
| 2 | Seth Davies | $1,078,347 | 500 |
| 3 | Adrian Mateos | $1,095,903 | 400 |
| 4 | Juan Pardo | $522,900 | 300 |
| 5 | Michael Watson | $404,100 | 250 |
| 6 | Daniel Dvoress | $320,900 | 200 |
| 7 | Timothy Adams | $249,600 | 150 |
Photo credits: Rational Intellectual Holdings Ltd., Danny Maxwell / Joe Giron.
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