“He's a total maniac,” said the commentators on the poker website that broadcast the Las Vegas World Series (WSOP), this year away from the ESPN sports network. The Galician Juan Maceiras, also known as LocoBoy, was the absolute dominator of the main tournament of the event for two critical days. The historical record of participants, more than 10,000 in the Main Event alone, allowed the winner to be awarded 12.1 million dollars, four times more than Carlos Alcaraz achieved for winning Wimbledon.
“I don't think I'm going crazy. People call me a maniac, but I only bluff when I think it's time”, declared Maceiras, who has returned to poker in style, after a few years of hiatus. Spanish belongs to one of the families closest to the card known. His sister María, also a player, won the Spanish Championship twice a decade and a half ago. Locoboy was close to victory when, with 12 players remaining, he had almost a quarter of the chips in his possession, but he had a fateful end to the tournament and could only finish eighth, with a prize of $1,125,000.
Actually, the true star of the family was always the father, Juan Maceiras Barros, in his day the youngest doctor in Spain, elected and re-elected mayor of Miño. In the years of the explosion of internet poker, he became famous under the nickname of Vietcong01, with a little academic game and the help of what he baptized as the pun.
final table
His son Juan, tired but happy when he was still the leader, boasted about his father during one of the breaks: “He did something that no one had done before, taking all the big online tournaments, including the Sunday Million, which he won twice”. Sitting to his left, another Spaniard, José Aguilera, was fighting to also enter the grand final of the tournament.. He managed to finish among the ten chosen ones who finally met at the same table, survivors among the 10,043 participants of a tournament that began on July 3.
Bad luck left Aguilera out of the final table of nine, the official one, in which close to a third of the 93 million total prize pool of the Main Event was distributed. The Spaniard was short-stacked after a triple clash (his queens against the kings and the jacks of two other players), in which the player with the worst cards won, coincidentally Daniel Weinman, who ended up winning the tournament. random things. The American, a tired poker pro, went from elimination to glory. Aguilera had to be content with tenth place.
In that diabolical mixture of skill and luck that is poker, Maceiras showed that not everything is coincidence and he spent at least two whole days stoking the unfortunate people who occupied his table.. As players dropped, the prize-hopping at the Horseshoe Hotel became more and more outrageous.. Player number 12, Cong Pham, took home $535,000. Aguilera got 700,000 and the ninth classified got 900,000. Maceiras was the first millionaire, in a dynamic in which each elimination is dramatic. As one of the participants said, that looked like 'The Hunger Games'.
technology graduate
Weinman admitted after his victory that he had been “very lucky”, but also that he felt like the best player of the last three, all of them Americans, after eliminating the other six Europeans who reached the final table.. The winner decided to give poker a try after graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology, his hometown.. “When the boom hit, I had a feeling I was going to play poker and try for a few years.. And here we are, 16 years later…. One feels that perhaps my time has come”
Daniel confesses that after 16 years in which he only entered prizes once in the main tournament, although he did win another minor bracelet, he was beginning to get tired of playing cards.. He was about to not sign up for the tournament of his life, but his girlfriend Sarah encouraged him to spend one more bullet: “I was burned out and I didn't like the structure of the tournament, it was too good”. When he won the record prize, he burst into tears with emotion.
Weinman had to answer the classic question about what he will do with the money: “I have no idea,” he said. “I'll probably reverse it. It's probably not the best answer that everyone wants to hear, but I'm pretty prudent with money off the table, even though I like to gamble a lot.”
Maceiras, during the World Cup in Las Vegas.
Despite the bitter end, a World Series of Poker (WSOP) with so much Spanish prominence is not remembered. Carlos Mortensen won the main tournament in 2001 and then we only had two finalists in the big test in Las Vegas (Larrabe and Pons). In exchange, they have won up to 16 bracelets, one less than the great dominator of the Series, the American Phil Helmut, a disputed player who nevertheless dominates the historical classification in an overwhelming way.. This year he achieved one more title, which he celebrated in style with the loud style that characterizes him.
The Spanish progression is indisputable. Last year, Leo Margets and Adrián Mateos won the last two bracelets. This year, Samuel Bernabéu from Alicante won tournament number 79, with a prize of $682,000. In that same event, also in no-limit Texas Holdem, Ramón Fernández was seventh and took home more than 100,000 big tickets.. No limit means that you can bet all the chips in any hand. Putting the deeds to the house, the car keys and even a close relative on the table is left for the movies.
Even better for ours was tournament number 57, in the complicated modality of Pot Limit Omaha, where players receive four hole cards instead of two.. The Spaniard Ka Kwan Lau (Kaju for friends) achieved victory in a final heads-up against his compatriot Sergio Martínez. The first earned 2.3 million, and the second, 1.4.
The last woman on stand up
In the list of Spaniards who will return from Las Vegas with a full wallet we can include the French Estelle Cohuet, who has lived in Palma de Mallorca for three decades and achieved the title of Last Woman Standing, the last woman standing in the tournament WSOP main. He finished in 68th position and earned a $130,000 bounty.
Another 24 Spaniards also managed to enter prizes in the competition. Among them, another player stands out, Lucía Navarro, who won a title, but outside the WSOP. On his first day in Las Vegas, just landed, he was encouraged to warm up at the Aria hotel, where he beat more than 500 players.
The Spaniard confirms to EL MUNDO the fever for playing cards that exists in the city: “All the tournaments in all the casinos are always full and with massive waiting lists. It seems that there has been another small poker boom”, he assures. This resurgence is partly explained by his economic situation: “You can see that they are more buoyant here. In addition, there is a lot of poker tradition and therefore there is a lot more recreational player than in Europe.” That makes the road to the final tables sometimes a little less steep for professionals.
Our country, by the way, also won a more honorary title than anything else, the Soccer World Cup in Las Vegas, which was played indoors, with Maceiras again as a star. Not surprisingly, the Galician was trained at an American university thanks to a scholarship awarded for his skills with the ball.