Chris Wallace Wins WSOP $10K HORSE Championship (Event #22)

Minnesota resident Christopher Wallace has won the $10,000 World Series of Poker H.O.R.S.E. championship (Event #22), after besting a field of 200 players over three days on his way to capturing a prestigious gold bracelet, and collecting the $507,614 first place prize. Following his impressive victory at the Rio in Las Vegas, the 40-year-old poker pro, said:
“If I was going to pick an event to win, this would be it. It feels great..It wasn’t intimidating for me. I know that I can beat a lot of these players. Having made a living off beating red name pros on Full Tilt, that got me over the star struck thing and the fear of good players.”
The specialized event attracted a small but tough field of pros to create a prize pool worth $1,880,000. Amongst those players then seeing a return on their $10k investment was Greg Mueller in 23rd ($18,254), Daniel Negreanu in 18th ($18,254), Bertran ‘ElkY’ Grospellier in 16th ($21,958), Justin Bonomo in 15th ($21,958), Nick Schulman in 14th ($26,432) and David Benyamine in 11th ($32,430).
Coming into the final table of eight, Chris Wallace’s best live tournament score was a 1st place finish in 2012 at the $275 Nightmare Hallow-Scream Tournament for $27,650. This time around the stakes were significantly higher for Wallace, who was then able to reach heads-up play against Randy Ohel with both players fairly even in chips.
Soon after, however, Wallace managed to pull away to a 5-to-1 lead before making a full house when his opponent had trips, to send Randy Ohel to the rails in a runner-up position worth $313,715. Meanwhile, Chris Wallace was awarded the bracelet and more than half a million dollars in prize money. Commenting after his triumph, Wallace explained:
“We got to five-handed and I thought ‘This is great. I’ve made a lot of money. Then we we got to three-handed, I knew I was going to be really angry if I didn’t win. You get to that point and you can see half a million dollars from there. And then you got to have it. If I had ended up second, I’d be pretty mad right now. This is such a big change for me.”
Final Table Results:
1 Chris Wallace – $507,614
2 Randy Ohel – $313,715
3 Richard Sklar – $206,499
4 Richard Ashby – $150,625
5 Max Pescatori – $112,066
6 Lee Goldman – $84,844
7 Bill Chen – $65,273
8 Calvin Anderson – $50,966