My friend Nolan Dalla’s recap of the remarkable chip-and-a-chair victory of Benjamin Keeline, who picked up a cool million dollars for winning the World Series Of Poker’s Colossus II tournament a couple of days ago:
When one considers the vast number of entries in this tournament, a whopping 21,613 players, the challenge becomes mind-boggling. It’s like playing through an entire town’s population or outlasting the number of people who attend a typical major league baseball game. It’s the stuff dreams are made of, provided no one thinks you’re delusional.
Down to his last breath, Keeline took a massive bad beat late on the first day of play, which left him hanging on by a thread. On that wicked hand, he had pocket kings snapped by pocket aces. Then, one hand later, Keeline was DOWN TO A SINGLE $500 CHIP WITH THE ANTES AT $500 AND THE BLINDS AT $1,500-$3,000.
Let those numbers sink in for a moment. There were almost 109,000,000 chips in play at the time. That’s 109 million. To win this tournament, Keeline would have to gain possession of every single one of those chips, and somehow do this all starting out with a single $500 chip.
This wasn’t an obstacle the size of a mountain. It was almost a virtual impossibility.