The $12.1 million hand: the WSOP 2023 Main Event final hand, street by street

In July 2023 Daniel Weinman won the WSOP Main Event and $12,100,000, the biggest first prize the event has paid. Steven Jones finished second for $6,500,000. The field was 10,043 entries.

The last hand was K♣︎J♦︎ against J♣︎8♦︎ on a jack-high board. Both players had top pair, and all the chips went in on the turn. Below I take it street by street, with the bet sizes, the pot and the stacks, the price each player got, and what the preflop charts say about the two starting hands.

The postflop numbers here are maths: pot odds, SPR and the equity of one hand against the other, which I count card by card. None of them are solver frequencies. I did not run a postflop solve of this spot for the article, so where I talk about strategy on the flop and turn, it is my reasoning, and I say so each time.

The facts of the hand

PGT reports the blinds at the start of heads-up as 1.25M/2.5M with a 2.5M big-blind ante, and Weinman’s 443M against Jones’s 159.5M. Heads-up lasted 24 hands. I assume the level had not changed by the last hand, so 1bb = 2.5M chips. The action of the final hand, as reported by Poker News Daily and PGT:

• Preflop: Jones on the button raises to 7M with J♣︎8♦︎. Weinman calls in the big blind with K♣︎J♦︎.
• Flop J♠︎5♠︎2♦︎: Weinman checks, Jones bets 6M, Weinman check-raises to 18.5M, Jones calls.
• Turn 4♣︎: Weinman bets 38M. Jones thinks for about four minutes and moves all-in for 146M. Weinman calls.
• River A♥︎: no help for Jones. Weinman wins with a pair of jacks and a king kicker.

The stacks at the start of the hand were not reported to the chip, so I derive them. Jones put in 7M preflop, 18.5M on the flop and 146M on the turn: 171.5M, or 68.6bb. That is the effective stack. Weinman had the rest of the 602.5M in play at the start of heads-up, about 431M. Take that one as an estimate.

Heads-up leaves only two prizes, so a player’s prize equity is a straight line in chips (second place paid $6.5M, first $12.1M):

Each chip is worth the same slice of the $5.6M difference, whoever holds it. Ignoring skill and future blinds, chipEV and $EV lead to the same decisions here, which is why I use chipEV charts below.

Preflop: both players did the normal thing

Poker Academy has heads-up tournament charts at 70bb. They don’t copy this hand exactly: the sim has a 0.25bb total ante (the Main Event had 1bb) and the button opens to 2.5bb (Jones made it 2.8bb). It is still the closest spot in the app, and it is chipEV, the right model heads-up.

The button plays almost everything: it raises 56.3% of hands, limps 40.7% and folds 3.1%. J8o raises about 93% of the time and limps the rest. Jones’s open is standard.

The ante changes the price for the big blind. In the hand Weinman called 4.5M more:

Against a 2.5bb raise the big blind folds 27.9%, calls 48.8% and 3-bets to 7.8bb 22.5% of the time. KJo is a mix, roughly half 3-bet and half call, so Weinman’s call is one of the solver’s two actions with that hand. Both players played the preflop the way the chart plays it.

The chart also says what the rest of his calling range looks like, which matters on the flop: AJo, AJs, KJs, QJs and JJ all 3-bet 100% here.

The flop: a small bet and a check-raise

The pot is 7M + 7M + 2.5M ante = 16.5M, or 6.6bb. With 164.5M left for Jones, the stack-to-pot ratio is about 10:

Weinman checks and Jones bets 6M:

About a third of the pot, on a two-tone board. Weinman raises to 18.5M, which is 3.1 times the bet. Jones has to call 12.5M more:

Weinman has top pair with a king kicker. The original version of this article called it “the strongest possible hand containing a jack”, which was wrong, because AJ has a better kicker. In the 70bb chart, though, AJ, KJs and QJs all 3-bet preflop, so KJo is the best top pair that reaches this flop by calling. The calling range still holds better hands than that: 55 calls 73% and 22 calls 100%, so sets are there, and so are the two-pair hands J5s and J2s.

Against Jones’s actual hand, I counted every turn and river. There are 45 unseen cards and 990 two-card runouts:

• Jones wins 120 of them. He needs an eight, and there are three left: 8♣︎, 8♥︎ and 8♠︎. An eight wins for him with any other card except a king, which gives Weinman two pair too.
• 36 runouts are a split. 5-5, 2-2, J-5 and J-2 give both players the same full house. A-5 and A-2 give both the same two pair with an ace kicker.
• Weinman wins the other 834.

Neither player has a spade, so neither has a flush draw. K♣︎J♦︎ blocks none of the spade flush draws in Jones’s range either, so all of them stay there and can keep calling a raise. That part is my reasoning, not a solver number. I have no solved tree of this exact spot, so I won’t give you a raise frequency.

The turn: 38M and all-in

After the flop call the pot is 16.5M + 18.5M + 18.5M = 53.5M, which is 21.4bb. Jones has 146M behind, 58.4bb.

The turn 4♣︎ puts 2-4-5 on the board. A3 now has a straight, and 63 has one too. It is a club, so the spade draws are still draws. Weinman bets 38M:

With an SPR under 3, a 71% bet commits a lot of the stack. If Jones just calls, the pot is 129.5M and 108M is left, less than the pot. So any continue is close to a decision for stacks.

The price Jones was getting on the 38M bet:

Against K♣︎J♦︎ he had 3 outs, the same three eights, out of 44 unseen cards:

A J♥︎ gives both players trips with the same board, and the king still plays. So only the eights help Jones: 6.8% for him.

Jones could not see Weinman’s cards, so his problem was range against range. What follows is my heuristic, not solver output. A raise all-in with one pair and an eight kicker gets called by the hands that beat it: better jacks, sets, two pair and straights. The hands it beats, the spade draws and smaller pairs, mostly fold, and the draws that do call still have outs. A raise that folds out what you beat and gets called by what beats you earns little, which leaves calling and folding as the options worth weighing with J8. Which of those two is best depends on how often Weinman’s check-raise then bet line has a bluff in it, and that is the question a postflop solve would answer.

The call

Weinman had bet 38M and faced a total of 146M, so he called 108M more:

He needed 31.3% equity against the range Jones jams with. Against the hand Jones had, he had 93.2%. The final pot was 345.5M, 138.2bb: Jones’s 171.5M plus Weinman’s 174M (2.5M ante, 7M, 18.5M and 146M). The river A♥︎ changed nothing.

If you want to look at the flop and turn yourself, the postflop solver takes the same spot. Set the button against the big blind, a 16.5M pot as 6.6bb with 65.8bb behind, the board J♠︎5♠︎2♦︎, the 36% bet and 3.1x raise, and you get your own strategy for every hand in both ranges.

What I take from the hand

• Track the pot in big blinds. 53.5M sounds huge, and it is 21.4bb, with 58.4bb behind and a turn SPR of 2.73.
• Price every decision. Jones needed 23.4% to call the flop raise and 29.3% to call the turn bet. Weinman needed 31.3% to call the jam.
• Count the outs. J♣︎8♦︎ against K♣︎J♦︎ was 86.1% for Weinman on the flop and 93.2% on the turn, three eights each time.
• Raise with a purpose. A raise wants calls from worse hands or folds from better ones, and one pair jamming into a check-raise and a turn bet rarely gets either.

Cheers! 🙂