By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 2, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
LAS VEGAS - Dimitar Danchev, the 39-year-old Bulgarian pro best known to North American poker readers for his 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event victory, won the 2026 World Series of Poker Event #7, the $25,000 Heads-Up No-Limit Hold'em Championship, on Monday night at Horseshoe Las Vegas. He defeated Russia's Nikita Kuznetsov in the final match to claim US$800,000 and his second WSOP gold bracelet, closing out a 128-entry bracket that had paid out the previous Sunday with Toronto-born Daniel Negreanu eliminated in the Round of 16.
The final match, played on a single elimination basis in front of a small live rail at the Horseshoe ESPN main feature table, ended on a board that gave Danchev a straight on a seventh-card river. According to the Card Player tournament desk's published recap, the deciding all-in went to Danchev's full house. Kuznetsov, who had been one of the heavier early-Day 2 chip leaders, finished as runner-up for US$528,000 and was denied his first WSOP bracelet.
The Bracket and the Final Eight
The 2026 edition of the Heads-Up Championship doubled its paid field from the 2025 event, which closed at 64 entries and paid out US$500,000 to winner Artur Martirosian. The 2026 field of 128 entries pushed the prize pool to approximately US$3.0-million and raised the first-place prize 60 per cent year-over-year. The event, scheduled across four days with two Day 1 starting flights on the Friday and Saturday of opening week, ran on a single-elimination match format with each match played to a single winner. Day 1a and Day 1b each fielded 64 entries, with 16 advancing from each flight to a 32-player Day 2.
The Round of 16 played on Sunday night, with the surviving sixteen consolidating into the eight quarterfinalists who returned for Monday's bracket. The Round of 16 produced two of the more talked-about results of the early WSOP series: Daniel Negreanu's elimination at the hands of China's Biao Ding after a chip-stack mismatch that, at its widest, ran ten-to-one in Negreanu's favour; and the elimination of five-time bracelet winner Michael Mizrachi by Japan's Ryuta Nakai. Both Negreanu and Mizrachi cashed for US$60,000 as Round of 16 finishers, and both immediately re-entered other bracelet events on the Monday and Tuesday calendar.
The quarterfinal round on Monday afternoon paired Danchev against Cary Katz, Kuznetsov against Henri Puustinen, World Poker Tour Player of the Year Alex Foxen against Thomas Boivin, and Ryuta Nakai against Biao Ding. The four winners advanced into Monday evening's semifinals with US$300,000 locked in. The four losing quarterfinalists each cashed for US$150,000.
The Semifinals and the Final
The semifinal matches paired Danchev against Nakai, and Kuznetsov against Foxen. Danchev defeated Nakai in a match that ran approximately three hours. Foxen, the husband of Canadian player Kristen Foxen and the lone North American left in the bracket, was eliminated by Kuznetsov in a match that finished closer to the four-hour mark. Foxen and Nakai each cashed for US$300,000 as semifinal losers.
The final match between Danchev and Kuznetsov, played as the centrepiece feature on the PokerGO main stream Monday evening, ran approximately five hours. Danchev opened the match as a slight chip leader after the bracket rebalance, with both players sitting on stacks in the 5,000,000 range. The decisive sequence, recorded in the published PokerNews tournament live blog, came after a heads-up hand in which Danchev river-bet a seven-high flush draw that completed on the river. Kuznetsov folded to a 600,000 value bet. Several hands later, on a board that read seven of clubs on the river, Danchev's full-house beat Kuznetsov's queen-high.
The full final-eight payout breakdown, including Player of the Year points and PGT points awards, was as follows.
| Place | Player | Country | Prize (US$) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dimitar Danchev | Bulgaria | $800,000 |
| 2 | Nikita Kuznetsov | Russia | $528,000 |
| 3 (tied) | Ryuta Nakai | Japan | $300,000 |
| 3 (tied) | Alex Foxen | United States | $300,000 |
| 5 (tied) | Cary Katz | United States | $150,000 |
| 5 (tied) | Thomas Boivin | Belgium | $150,000 |
| 5 (tied) | Biao Ding | China | $150,000 |
| 5 (tied) | Henri Puustinen | Finland | $150,000 |
Who Danchev Is
Dimitar Danchev's career arc is one of the more unusual in the contemporary live tournament circuit. He came to international prominence in 2013 with the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event victory for US$1,859,000, his largest career score, and finished second at the European Poker Tour San Remo event in October 2011. After several years of moderate live activity, he won a Triton Series title in Jeju, South Korea, in 2024, his third deepest career cash. The US$800,000 he banked on Monday is now Danchev's fourth-largest live score and brings his career tournament earnings, by the public Hendon Mob record, past US$8-million.
His first WSOP gold bracelet, according to the official WSOP player profile, was won online in a smaller-field heads-up event run on WSOP Online during the COVID-era summer schedule. The Monday bracelet is his first live WSOP title and the second of his career. The Bulgarian player's run through the 2026 Heads-Up Championship covered eight matches across four days, requiring him to win each match individually rather than accumulate chips over multiple opponents in a single sitting. The total time spent at the table across the four days, by the live-blog timestamps, was approximately twenty-eight hours of play.
The Ontario Angle
The lone North American semi-finalist, Alex Foxen, plays a recurring role in Canadian poker coverage through his marriage to Kristen Foxen, the Toronto-born player who won her sixth career WSOP bracelet at the 2024 series. Alex Foxen has spoken in the past, in podcast appearances and live-blog interviews, about the time he and Kristen split between Las Vegas and Toronto, and about the routine they keep across the Canadian and U.S. tournament calendars. His Monday semifinal loss to Kuznetsov, while not by itself a Canadian story, removes the only player from this bracket with a direct Toronto-resident connection and closes the bracket as a Bulgarian and Russian heads-up final.
The deeper Ontario read of the Heads-Up Championship is the Negreanu result. The Toronto-born player entered Day 2 of the event last Friday as the chip leader of the remaining sixteen-player field and exited the bracket on Sunday night in the Round of 16, victim of one of the lowest-probability heads-up comebacks the championship has produced in several years. The wider Ontario poker storyline of the 2026 WSOP, as we covered in Sunday's bracket-exit piece on Negreanu, is that the Canadian-flagged player count in this year's series is on pace to be at or near the multi-year high it has tracked at since the regulated Ontario online market opened in April 2022, and that the live results, although individually variable, fit the same broad pattern the iGaming Ontario regulator and the AGCO have been recording since the regulated provincial online tables came online.
Negreanu, who immediately re-entered Event #11, the $10,000 GGMillion$ High Roller, after his Sunday-night exit, is in Day 2 of that event on Tuesday afternoon with a starting stack of 154,000 chips, roughly ten big blinds above the average. The Heads-Up Championship will not return to the WSOP calendar until the 2027 series.
The Read
For Ontario readers who follow the live circuit, the practical takeaway from the 2026 Heads-Up Championship is that the doubled field size produced a deeper bracket and a wider international winners distribution than the 64-player editions of the recent past. The 2026 final-four (Danchev, Kuznetsov, Nakai, Foxen) is the first time the championship has produced a final four with players from four different countries since 2018. The doubling of the field also produced the first US$800,000 first-prize line in event history, a figure that, on the trajectory of registration growth, may continue to climb. The 2027 edition, on the announced WSOP schedule, will be priced at the same US$25,000 buy-in.
The Ontario poker storylines worth watching across the rest of the week, with the Heads-Up Championship now closed, are the FanDuel Poker Ontario launch on June 3, the PokerStars Ontario legacy account cashout deadline on June 4, the closing weekend of the GG Ontario Festival on June 7, the Phil Hellmuth bid for an eighteenth WSOP bracelet in Event #9 which concluded with Scott Clements taking the bracelet on Tuesday morning, and the continued bracket progression of Daniel Negreanu in Event #11's GGMillion$ High Roller. The Canadian bracelet count at the 2026 WSOP, as of Tuesday morning, remains at zero, with the year's marquee Canadian results so far being Daniel Ghionoiu's C$370,001 WSOPC Playground main event win in May and Daniel Dvoress's Triton Montenegro triple the same week.