Belgium Michael Gathy Wins WSOP $1k NLHE

Belgium pro Michael Gathy has won WSOP Event#21: $1k NLHE, after defeating a field of 2,799 players over three days to scoop a career first gold bracelet, as well as the $440,829 top prize.
The 23 year old is mostly an online pro and only cashed in at his first live poker tournament last September. Since then Gathy has had a number of cashes including winning the €1,700 Belgian Poker Series for $233,645, and now with his WSOP victory has taken his live earnings to an impressive $774,338.
Michael Gathy has also become only the second Belgium ever to win a gold winners bracelet, the first having been Davidi Kitai back in 2008.
After the short stacks were eliminated from the nine man final table, Michael Gathy was the next player in trouble after his A-Q lost to Eric Baldwin‘s K-K shove. However, Gathy then began to shove his short stack preflop several times and managed to grind his way back up, while Baldwin fared much worse. Having shoved pre-flop with Q-Q, Baldwin was called by Noah Vaillancourt (Ah-4d) with the flop then falling ace high to eliminate the tables best known player in 5th for $101,948.
A couple of hours later, he was joined by John Esposito (Ad-6d), who decided to call Jamie Armstrong’s preflop shove with A-8. A short stacked Noah Vaillancourt then decided to shove preflop with Q-10 only to be called by Armstrong with A-Q, and so exited the competition in 3rd ($193,089), while the heads-up phase got underway.
Despite being fairly even in chips, Jamie Armstrong pulled away to a 3 to 1 advantage before giving up some ground having 3-bet all-in with K-9 into his opponent’s K-Q. Not long after, Armstrong was all-in holding 9-9 to Gathy’s 10-10 and with no surprises from the board, Michael Gathy took down the WSOP’s cheapest buy-in event for $440,829.
The final table payouts were as follows:
1. Michael Gathy – $440,829
2. Jamie Armstrong – $273,776
3. Noah Vaillancourt – $193,089
4. John Esposito – $139,457
5. Eric Baldwin – $101,948
6. Eric Davis – $75,422
7. Jean-Louis Santoni – $56,543
8. Jason Manggunio – $42,749
9. Josh Field – $32,748