Joe Cada Wins WSOP Main Event

Joe Cada has succeeded in becoming the youngest World Series of Poker Main Event Champion of all time after winning the $8.55 million prize at the age of just 21. Joe, who has been playing poker seriously for around six years, came of age in great style, beating 6,493 other players, including the likes of Phil Ivey, to win both the competition and one of the coveted WSOP Champion bracelets.

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Even experienced poker players like Joe Cada acknowledge that the odds of winning the World Series of Poker are pretty slim. Lengthy playing sessions make concentration of paramount importance, and just one slip could cost a player the whole tournament. Potential bad beats make proper chip stack management an essential part of the game, and then there’s the small matter of having almost 6,500 opponents who are all trying to win the tournament for themselves. To say that winning the World Series of Poker is a long shot doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Joe was well aware of the those odds when he entered the 2009 WSOP tournament. He has said that he, like many other poker players, had often dreamed of becoming a World Series of Poker Main Event Champion, but he didn’t really recognise that he might have a real chance of making that dream come true in 2009 until the 6,494 players that started out had been whittled down to 180. When he arrived at the final table then the notion of winning himself a bracelet became even more realistic.

Eventually Joe managed to get into the last two, and went head to head against Darvin Moon, a 46 year old logger from Maryland. Joe entered that final stage of the tournament with a chip stack worth $135 million, but Darvin initially managed to dominate the head to head and bring Joe’s stack down to $40 million. Fortunately, Joe kept his wits about him and clawed his way back into contention. Almost three hours after the head-to-head started, Joe Cada emerged the 2009 WSOP Champion.

We congratulate Joe Cada on his tremendous success, and would also like to compliment Darvin Moon on his own considerable achievement. The 2009 World Series of Poker Main event was everything that the poker world had hoped it would be, and we look forward to the next WSOP tournament in 2010.

William Briggs