Bryn Kenney Leads the WSOP $250,000 Super High Roller Final Nine With a US$4.3-Million First Prize on the Line, Phil Ivey Carries the Short Stack Into Monday Bracelet Day

By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 15, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen

LAS VEGAS - The 2026 World Series of Poker reaches its single-largest-cash bracelet day on Monday afternoon. Event #41, the $250,000 Super High Roller No-Limit Hold'em, finished its Day 2 session at the Horseshoe and Paris on Sunday night with nine survivors from a 56-entry field. Bryn Kenney, the Long Beach, New York-born pro who topped the Hendon Mob all-time live tournament earnings list at US$84.8 million across the prior decade of high-roller circuit play, bagged 19,350,000 chips for the Monday afternoon restart and the chip lead. The first prize on the line is US$4,334,411, the largest single first-place cash on the 2026 series schedule and the second-largest single first prize on the WSOP-branded calendar since the December 2025 PokerGO Tour Player of the Year apex event. The prize pool, set at US$13,720,000 by Saturday afternoon's late-registration closure at 2:15 p.m. local time, is the sixth-largest single-event purse in 2026 series history.

The nine-handed final-table return list also features a working Phil Ivey storyline. The eleven-time bracelet winner and Las Vegas-based legend who won his eleventh gold in 2024 sits ninth in chips with 2,750,000 and a 22-big-blind starting position at the Day 3 opening level. The 11th-bracelet count is the active Las Vegas record, on the published WSOP player profile, and trails only Phil Hellmuth on the all-time American leaderboard. Ivey's short-stack return, even at 22 big blinds, is a working position at a 9-handed Super High Roller table where the average stack would be approximately 9.55 million chips. A double-up inside the opening rotation cycle would put him into the chip-share top three. The structural shape of the Day 3 final, on the present chip counts, runs roughly four-to-one between the top stack and the short stack, a typical Super High Roller final-day spread.

The Final Nine

The Saturday-and-Sunday session at Event #41 ran 11 hours each across the two days, with 47 of the 56 entrants eliminated and the field stretched into the nine-handed bracelet stage that returns Monday afternoon. The chip-share gradient, on the published Day 2 bag counts, runs as follows.

The published payout structure, on the WSOP-standardised $250,000 first-day payout ladder, guarantees a minimum US$518,518 for ninth place and ascends through the nine-handed prize-pool slots to the US$4,334,411 first prize. Each of the nine finalists is now guaranteed a six-figure cash. The cash-money distribution between first and second is the 33-percent spread typical of high-roller final-day structures, on a roughly 4.3-to-2.8 ratio. The PokerGO live broadcast, by the WSOP's published schedule, begins at 5 p.m. local time, on a three-hour delay from the 2 p.m. local time first-card-of-the-day.

The Kenney Read

Bryn Kenney's bracelet bid, on the published archive, is for his third career bracelet, his first since the 2024 WSOP Online $2,100 Bounty Championship that he took on GGPoker for US$226,057. The 2024 online bracelet was Kenney's first since the 2014 $1,500 Six-Handed 10-Game Mix at the Rio in Las Vegas, the bracelet that this newsroom's longer-form player profile archive places in the mid-2010s era of his pre-Triton dominance. The decade-long gap between his first and second bracelets is the structural through-line of Kenney's WSOP record. He holds the all-time Hendon Mob live tournament earnings lead at US$84.8 million, but his 81 WSOP cashes and 19 WSOP final tables, on the WSOP-side records, have only converted to two bracelets across the same career window.

The $250,000 Super High Roller bracelet, on this read, would be a record-validating result for Kenney rather than a record-breaking one. Kenney's three-card-game on the prior published live-coverage commentary across the 2022, 2023 and 2024 series has been a higher-aggression approach than the median Super High Roller field plays. The Saturday-and-Sunday session at Event #41, by the published Day 1 wrap, ran consistent with that pattern. Kenney accumulated his chip-leading stack across three significant single-pot accumulations against Phil Hellmuth (eliminated on the stone bubble in 12th, the only Hellmuth in-the-money bubble at a WSOP open event in the past decade), Jonathan Jaffe (eliminated in 14th), and a late-Day-2 cooler against David Peters that took the chip lead onto Kenney's side. The Day 3 final-table sequence, on the present chip-share gradient, gives Kenney the structural advantage that he has not regularly held in his prior bracelet finals.

The Ivey Read

Phil Ivey's 11-bracelet count, set at the 2024 WSOP, has been the active Las Vegas record since his last win two years ago. The published Las Vegas live-coverage commentary across the 2025 and 2026 series has framed each subsequent Ivey deep cash, including Ivey's deep run at the 2026 $25,000 NLH Heads-Up Championship in May that Dimitar Danchev won, as a 12th-bracelet bid against the long-standing Phil Hellmuth all-time bracelet count. Ivey's Day 2 session at the $250,000 Super High Roller, on the published live-coverage account, ran the swingy pattern that has characterised his 2026 series across multiple events. He was all-in multiple times across the Saturday-and-Sunday flow, including a major pre-flop coup with kings against a Brandon Wilson queens cooler in late Saturday afternoon, and a Sunday-afternoon double-up against David Einhorn that lifted him from a three-big-blind tournament-life stack into the 22-big-blind Monday-restart position. The 22-big-blind position is workable but tight. A double-up inside the opening orbit of Monday's nine-handed restart, by the typical pre-flop ranges of the field, would put Ivey into the four-handed-stack-share range and create a viable bracelet-chase path. Without the double-up, the path is the short-stack one-hand-at-a-time grind.

The Field of Names

Adrian Mateos of Spain sits second in chips at 16,900,000. The 30-year-old Madrid pro who took his fourth WSOP bracelet at the 2021 Online $25,000 Super High Roller on GGPoker is the most accomplished European at the table by bracelet count, ahead of Samuel Mullur of Sweden (no prior bracelets) in fifth and Jason Koon of the United States (the reigning $250,000 Super High Roller champion who took the 2025 event for US$4,752,551) in seventh. The Koon storyline is the back-to-back-defence one, with Koon trying to capture his second consecutive $250K Super High Roller bracelet, an achievement no player has previously executed at this buy-in level.

David Einhorn, the Greenlight Capital hedge fund founder and amateur poker enthusiast who has played the Super High Roller circuit for two decades, sits third with 13,400,000. Brandon Wilson, who fell short of the runner-up cash at the 2025 $250K Super High Roller in Brandon Steven's heads-up cap, sits fourth at 9,625,000. Sean Winter, the Day 1 chip leader who had bagged 6,450,000 by the Day 2 closing flag, holds sixth. Michael Moncek, the relatively quieter American Super High Roller regular, sits eighth at 3,250,000.

The Ontario Read

None of the nine Day 3 returnees is Canadian. The published 56-entry Saturday-and-Sunday field did not include a Canadian player on the prior buy-in. Daniel Negreanu, the Toronto-and-Las-Vegas pro who is the closest Canadian to a regular $250,000 Super High Roller participant, did not enter the 2026 event. Kristen Foxen, fresh off her sixth-bracelet $25,000 High Roller win on June 7, did not enter the $250K event. The Canadian read on the $250K bracelet day is the pipeline read.

The regulated provincial Ontario qualifier pipeline, on the present 2026 calendar, terminates at the C$5,000 buy-in level. The GGPoker Ontario Stage 1 (C$5), Stage 2 (C$50), and Sunday Final Stage (C$500) satellite ladder to the August WSOP Super Circuit Canada at Playground in Kahnawake bridges the recreational provincial player into the C$5,000 main event seat. There is no published Ontario-licensed satellite path into the $250,000 Super High Roller, on the AGCO operator base. The structural commercial reason is the C$250,000 buy-in price point sits orders of magnitude above the recreational provincial price point that the AGCO-licensed operators target, on the iGaming Ontario quarterly demographic data. The C$2.50 to C$25 microFestival buy-in tier that opened on Sunday, the C$5 to C$25 Ontario Festival tier that closed on June 9, and the C$500 to C$2,500 Sunday WSOP-branded satellite tier that runs through August are the three commercial product tiers that span the regulated Ontario operator base. The $250,000 Super High Roller is, in commercial product-tier terms, four tiers above the highest provincial regulated tier on offer.

The structural gap is not unique to Ontario. The British Columbia Lottery Corporation, the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis regulator, and the international online satellite path through the offshore GGPoker network all stop at the same C$1,000 to C$5,000 satellite-buy-in level. The $250,000 Super High Roller and the December $1,000,000 ALPHA8 are the two events on the WSOP calendar at which the satellite-feeder pipeline is not the production source. The field for these two events is, in practical terms, a self-selected elite high-roller field that pays cash. The Canadian observer-side question for the next decade, on the regulated provincial market trajectory, is whether the Canadian regulated operator base will introduce higher-tier satellite product or whether the apex-event circuit will remain the cash-at-the-cage event that it has been since the inaugural 2010 $1,000,000 Big One for One Drop.

Day 21 Schedule

The Monday Day 21 schedule, on the published WSOP calendar, runs nine events. Event #41 the $250,000 Super High Roller plays from 2 p.m. local time on Day 3. Event #42 the $10,000 Big O Championship plays Day 3 from 12 p.m. local with 30 survivors returning from the 456-entry field, Doug Lorgeree at the chip lead with 3,355,000 and Scott Clements at second on 2,000,000. Event #34 the $500 COLOSSUS plays Day 3 from 11 a.m. local with the projected 500-to-700-survivor field returning from the 16,269-entry total. Event #45 the $2,500 Mixed Omaha Hi-Lo / Stud Hi-Lo and Event #43 the $800 Deepstack 8-Handed open at 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. local. Three new events open across the day. The first prospective Canadian deep-stack of Monday, on the prior cash-history pattern, is the Big O Championship Day 3 final-table list.

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