'Rookie' William Oertling Wins 2025 Beau Rivage Heater Main Event

The 2025 Beau Rivage Heater series featured a $50,000 guaranteed $300 buy-in ‘Rookies’ event that was open only to players with recorded tournament earnings of $25,000 or less. 23-year-old William Oertling fit the bill, and tried his hand in the unique event.

While he failed to cash, he ended up winning an even larger one at the same series, which ran from Jan. 3-13 at the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Oertling hopped in the $1,200 buy-in $1,000,000 guaranteed main event and ended up as the last player standing from a field of 1,755 total entries. The Louisiana resident earned a career-best payday of $216,888 as the champion. (As a result, he is now no longer eligible for the rookies event the next time it runs!)

“I fired one bullet in the rookies event. I had about $20k in cashes, so right under, and yeah I busted it, but it seems like it was all worth it,” Oertling told GulfCoastPoker.net in a short video interview after his win.

Prior to this six-figure win, Oertling’s top scores were two cashes for around $5,000 each that were recorded within a few days of each other last month in Las Vegas.

This latest victory also came with 1,080 Card Player Player of the Year points for Oertling. It was the first POY-qualified score of his career, and just his tenth lifetime cash. Those points are currently enough to place him third in the early 2025 POY standings presented by Global Poker.

The strong turnout for this event saw the guarantee nearly doubled, with $1,842,750 in total prize money paid out in the end. While a ‘rookie’ ultimately won the title, several highly accomplished players ran deep in this event, including 2024 World Series of Poker $50,000 pot-limit Omaha event sixth-place finisher Gabriel Andrade (9th – $32,617), 2015 Mid-States Poker Tour bestbet Jacksonville main event fifth-place finisher Andrew Dykeman (6th – $62,283), and 2010 WSOP main event sixth-place finisher John Dolan (4th – $159,829).

Cody Stanford, who finished third for $168,923, also took second in another $1,000,000 guaranteed event at the series for over $180,000. The full results for that event have not yet been released.

Check out GulfCoastPoker.net’s video chat with Oertling below:

A Rookies to Riches story: just one more data point for why every tour should hold a Rookies Event. We've come up with some novel events (we will protect) but we encourage everybody to adopt Rookies Events. Not good for poker—great for poker.

At the 2025 @BeauBiloxi Heater,… pic.twitter.com/QkAfx1gcTz

— Wild Bill Phillips (@GCPNet) January 14, 2025

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

Winner photo credit: GulfCoastPoker.net Facebook account.

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