San Diego poker pro David Miscikowski capped a substantial online and live tournament career over the weekend with his first World Series of Poker bracelet and his biggest pay-day yet – $719,707.
Miscikowski’s previous best score was $13,400 in a 2012 WPT event, although he has managed to cash eleven times in WSOP events previously.
He was one of 696 players who ponied up $5,000 to enter event 49 this week, a NLHE competition with a prize pool of $3,271,200 that needed an extra day to conclude due to a long, hard heads up.
Day 3 of the event saw the formation of a final table led by the San Diego pro, who faced Norbert Szecsi, Blake Bohn, Margareta Morris, Oliver Price, Manig Loeser, Jean Gaspard, John Dolan and Kevin MacPhee.
Down to the heads up, Miscikowski confronted Norbert Szecsi, a WSOP bracelet-winner last year who turned out to be a formidable opponent as the duo went at each other with almost even stacks. Three hours later they were still wrestling for supremacy, with the lead changing several times before tournament officials called for an extra day.
The two players returned Saturday to decide the matter, with Miscikowski about a million chips ahead, but that still required a further two hours of fiercely contested poker before Miscikowski was able to pull ahead with a pot worth over 3 million chips. That gave him the strength to finally put a tough opponent away and send Szecsi home with a well-earned $444,425 runner up prize.
Pay-outs for the rest of the final looked like this:
Manig Loeser – $288,912
Margareta Morris – $212,202
Oliver Price – $158,064
Kevin MacPhee – $119,267
Jean Gaspard – $91,037
John Dolan – $70,265
Blake Bohn – $54,792