Galfond Challenge: Phil vs. Kornuth after 10 sessions

On Saturday, October 10, after a week-long break, Phil Galfond resumed his match against Chance Kornuth, who finally managed to solve the deposit limit issues at WSOP.com. Overall, Phil is ahead by more than $200,000.

Will Chance Kornuth be able to come back?

Our last Galfond Challenge update was a week ago when the match had to be stopped because Chance's cashier was busted out by Phil and could not deposit any more money. Now the situation was fixed, and in the last session, Kornuth recovered $78k.

At the end of the tenth day of action, Kornuth sent the following message called "The Danger of Solver Fixation" to its subscribers:

Chance Kornuth The Danger of Solver Fixation

"This week was a short one. We only played one session and I ended up +78k. While I didn't put a lot of volume in this week, I had one major takeaway. It's okay to play how I want and I shouldn't be so focused on the solver."

Kornuth confessed that he did a lot of solver work before the challenge and now recognizes that playing perfect poker is impossible. He says that studying (including solvers) is crucial for a player, but that in the end, you need to develop your own game.

Phil vs. Chance results

Session / Date	Winner	Profit
3 (25 September)	Phil Galfond	$67,000
4 (26 September)	Chance Kornuth	$20,000
5 (29 September)	Phil Galfond	$43,500
6 (30 September)	Chance Kornuth	$70,000
7 (1 October)	Phil Galfond	$117,000
8 (2 October)	Phil Galfond	$28,000
9 (3 October)	Phil Galfond	$103,000
10 (10 October)	Chance Kornuth	$78,000
Total	Phil Galfond	$202,000

The break was beneficial to Kornuth. Check out the most exciting hands from the last session in the video below, including comments from Nathan Gamble and Henry Kilbane. The largest pot involved $62k: Chance flopped a set of sixes that beat his opponent's monster draw.