Daniel Zack is the 2022 WSOP Player of the Year

Danien Zack Wins 2022 WSOP Player of the Year Award

With all the events (except for the invitational Tournament of Champions) concluding, we have our official player of the year for the 2022 World Series of Poker.

It’s Daniel Zack. The American card player hailing from Princeton, New Jersey won the $10,000 Omaha Hi-Lo 8-or-Better event for $440,757 on June 7th; then took down the $10,000 7-Card Stud Hi-Lo event for $324,174 on June 18th.

He has collected an additional 15 cashes for himself during the summer. The biggest score of them was $488,095, which he got for his 8th place finish in the $250,000 NLHE High Roller.

Zack took a significant lead in the POY race early in the series with his two bracelet wins. He ended the competition with 4530.64 points, ahead of his fellow American Daniel Weinman with 4040.20 points in second place, and 2021 WSOP Main Event winner Koray Aldemir from Germany with 3275.02 points in third.

Overall, Dan Zack has won 3 WSOP gold bracelets during his career (the first being from 2019).

Joao Vieira Takes Down $50,000 High Roller No Limit Hold’em Event for $1.384 Million

Portugal’s Joao “naza114” Vieira made headlines in the poker world back in April 2021, for becoming the biggest online tournament winner of all time with $23.533 million in online MTT cashes. He overtook the Swedish Niklas “lena900” Astedt.

Since then, he’s been missing from PocketFives’ famous list. However, not because he stopped winning, rather, he hid his scoresheet from the public.

Now, he captured glory on the live felt. He beat the Spanish Lander Lijo heads-up for the title in this year’s WSOP last high roller, the $50K NLHE event. Vieira pocketed no less than $1.384 million, along with his second WSOP gold bracelet. He won his first back in 2019.

Lawrence Brandt Tops the Field in the $3,000 H.O.R.S.E. Event for $205,139

Since the WSOP is the place where lesser-played poker game types receive considerable attention, let’s close our coverage of this series with a mixed game event.

H.O.R.S.E. is an acronym for all the different game types it’s comprised of: Hold’em, Omaha, Razz, Stud, and Eight-or-Better Stud. 327 players entered this tournament.

The last two standing were the eventual winner Lawrence Brandt and Roberto Marin. In the last hand, a 7-Card Stud party, Brandt ended up making Quad 9’s by 7th street. All the chips were in the middle by the third street, thus he claimed victory. Marin’s pair of 4’s did not stand a chance…

It was the Texan Brandt’s second bracelet at the 2022 World Series, having won one in the $1,500 PLO Hi-Lo event earlier as well.

Here’s our last list of the major event results since our last update:

Earlier, we reported on GGPoker satellite qualifier Espen Jorstad winning the 2022 WSOP Main Event for $10 million.

WSOP 2022 Comes to a Close

The 53rd World Series of Poker is hereby over.

In terms of trending topics, the poker community started the series with some squabble over tanking. It ended up being quite prevalent, as Main Event runner-up finisher Adrian Attenborough was mulling over his decision for almost ten minutes before making the call with the losing hand that ended the tournament.

Alas, it ended with something much more sinister: players running scared for their lives, believing there is an active shooter on the hunt.

This was the first WSOP event held on the famous Las Vegas Boulevard (better known as “The Strip”). Paris Las Vegas and Bally’s Las Vegas debuted as venues. They saw the second largest Main Event field ever, with a staggering $80.780 million in the prize pool.

A total of 88 live events were played this year. Hopefully, you'll stick with us till next year's coverage for WSOP 2023.

Stay tuned on our Telegram channel for more EV+ news.