ESPN.com, the largest sports news site out there picked the 18 biggest poker stories of last year.
ESPN.com, the number one sports news site on the internet featured a long piece reminiscing about 2018 in the world of poker.
Ever since the Black Friday events ended the run of Poker After Dark on NBC and High Stakes Poker on the Game Show Network, the biggest exposure poker gets on American television is the WSOP coverage on ESPN. Each summer, the Disney-owned sports channel brings the poker action from the Rio in Las Vegas to hundreds of thousands of households across America.
ESPN also has a huge audience online with hundreds of millions of visitors monthly. In fact, they are the number one website in the sports news category.
That is why it is a big deal when they decide to feature poker. This time, they published the 18 biggest stories in poker last year. They didn’t rank these stories by importance, they listed them in chronological order.
Here’s some of the biggest poker stories, events and people that made the cut for ESPN, the most notable ones:
January 8th: Maria Lampropulos wins the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event for $ 1,081,100. The Argentinian woman is the first female poker player to claim that title.
February 14th: Viktor “Isildur1” Blom, one of online poker’s biggest legends wins the partypoker MILLIONS Germany for €850,000. This famous hand that some dubbed “the call of the century” went down in that tournament.
February 25th: British poker pro Jake Cody puts all of his tournament prize money (£42,000) on black at the roulette table – and wins.
Feeling damn good today! 😂
— Jake Cody (@JakeCody) February 26, 2018
June 10th: Doyle Brunson plays his last tournament. He finished 7th in the WSOP $10,000 NL 2-7 Lowball Draw Championship. After being knocked out, the rest of the final table gave a standing ovation while the Texas Dolly took his last bows.
July 10th: Phil Hellmuth wins his 15th gold bracelet, expanding his lead in terms of all time WSOP titles.
July 15th: Each year, the WSOP Main Event is the most covered event in poker. This year it drew 7,874 entries, the second most in the World Series’ history. John Cynn was the player who eventually bested the large field, earning himself $8.8 million.
July 18th: 2018 no doubt was Justin Bonomo’s year. The American cardplayer went on an insane heater in the high stakes tournament scene, which culminated in him taking down the WSOP Big One for One Drop for $10,000,000. With that victory he took over Daniel Negreanu on Hendon’s All Time money list – Bonomo has won more on poker tournaments than anyone else in history.
September 18th: Ali Imsirovic wins the Poker Masters Purple Jacket. The high roller tournament series featuring the very best of the poker world was held the second time this year. The Bosnian man accumulated the most in winnings over the course of the 7 tournaments, finishing first in two of them and cashing in one.
The rise of short-deck poker, Chris Ferguson’s apology and Aaron Johnson’s second Heartland Poker Tour Player of the Year Award also got a mention by ESPN. Somewhat surprisingly, they didn’t include Tom Dwan’s $2.3 million monster pot against Paul Phua from the Triton Jeju high stakes cash game.
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