WSOP Main Event 2023 Champ Snags $12.1 Million

By Scott Roeben, on July 18 2023
3 min read 1 comment
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The 54th annual World Series of Poker (WSOP) has dubbed its Main Event champion: Daniel Weinman.

Weinman bested 10,043 players to win $12.1 million, the equivalent of 12 cabanas at a typical Las Vegas dayclub.

The win is the largest Main Event prize in the history of the World Series of Poker.

Somebody’s going to need a bigger wallet. Also, no hats indoors.

Practice, apparently, makes perfect, as this was Daniel Weinman’s 16th year playing in the World Series of Poker.

The entire prize pool for the WSOP Main Event was $93.4 million.

Let’s just say this isn’t your grandpa’s poker night with the boys from the Veteran’s Lodge.

The Main Event is the most visible part of the World Series of Poker, a months-long series of events where mostly grown men vie for fancy jewelry. And by that, we mean mostly men, but mostly grown applies in many cases. If you know, you know.

Here are some words from the WSOP’s news release to describe how the Main Event culminated: “Steven Jones kicked off the final day of play on Monday in the lead with a chip count of 238,000,000. Adam Walton was the first to exit the final table after losing to Weinman’s pocket aces. After 23 hands in heads up play, tensions were high as both Jones and Weinman each tabled a pair of jacks, but Weinman had him out-kicked with a king, taking home the win in dramatic fashion.”

In poker, “dramatic” is used very loosely, as most poker is about as much fun to watch as concrete curing.

Still, there’s no denying the excitement around a guy winning $12.1 million dollars and a bejeweled bracelet as large as a surfboard.

Unlike the other World Series, this competition actually includes competitors from around the world.

The winner’s bracelet features 500 grams of 10-karat yellow gold, 2,352 gemstones, including 42 carats of diamonds, and 425 black and red stones to accentuate the suits.

While they didn’t get a fancy bracelet, the runners-up did pretty well. Steven Jones placed second in the Main Event and won $6.5 million. Walton took third place and a prize of $4 million.

We don’t follow the WSOP too closely, but we can’t remember the last time the top three finishers were all American. Not too shabby.

Daniel Weinman is a professional poker player, but his LinkedIn page says, “I’m a full stack web developer who specializes in building React.js applications, but prefers backend development. I enjoy building full stack applications from the ground up, generally using Node.js and Express for the backend.”

We want to party with this guy.

It was great to see the WSOP is still going strong following the move from its longtime home at Rio to Horseshoe on The Strip.

Yes, we were the first to share the WSOP would be moving to Horseshoe, known as Bally’s at the time. Not everything has to be about us, though, so please stop with the accolades. Our scoop was shared in June 2019 (see below) and confirmed in Nov. 2021.

The number of poker rooms in Las Vegas may have declined dramatically, mostly because they don’t generate revenue for casinos, but the high level of attendance at this years World Series of Poker confirms there are still a lot of folks busy flopping and big blinding and check-raising and splashing the pot and belly busting and limping and nut flushing and cracking and pocket pairing and slowplaying and bad beating and rebuying and drawing dead.

Congrats to Daniel Weinman on his 2023 WSOP Main Event win. Our advice to Daniel: Don’t blow the entire $12.1 million on React.js applications, whatever those might actually be.

 

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