Alex Foxen Wins WSOP $10,000 Super Turbo Bounty for US$594,246, Lifting Foxen Household Tally to Ten

By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 17, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen

Alex Foxen captured his fourth career World Series of Poker bracelet on Sunday night at the Horseshoe and Paris ballrooms in Las Vegas, winning Event #44, the $10,000 buy-in Super Turbo Bounty No-Limit Hold'em, for US$594,246. The result came eight days after his wife, Kristen Foxen, claimed her sixth bracelet in the $25,000 High Roller, and it lifts the most-decorated household in tournament poker to ten WSOP titles between them.

For Ontario, the headline is not the Foxen surname but the maiden name. Kristen Foxen was born Kristen Dawn Bicknell on December 29, 1986, in St. Catharines, Ontario, the Niagara Region city of just under 140,000 people about a 90-minute drive from Toronto. She is a six-time WSOP bracelet winner and the all-time female live-tournament earnings leader, with cashes recorded under the Canadian flag throughout her career. With her husband, a New York-born high-stakes professional who married Bicknell in Florida in 2022, the household now spans two passports and three decades of poker history.

The Event #44 final, in four hands

Event #44 is the WSOP's signature short-stack format: a one-day, $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold'em tournament with a $5,000 bounty placed on every player and a faster-than-usual level structure designed to compress a full event into a single calendar day. The 2026 edition drew 466 entries, a healthy turnout for a $10K and a strong mid-week prize pool for the players who survived to the final nine.

Foxen entered the final table with a meaningful but not commanding stack and gradually accumulated knockouts through the night, eventually finding himself heads-up against China's Yixi Tang. The deciding hand was, by Super Turbo standards, conventional: Foxen put his chips in with king-high, Tang called with queen-three offsuit. The flop paired Tang's queen, the turn paired Foxen's king, and the river was a blank. Tang earned US$396,145 for second.

"I think your career is really about repeated performance and an entire body of work, rather than one event," Foxen told PokerNews after the win. "Proving something. This doesn't feel like to me as much the one that would do that, but it's a piece of the body of work, so I'm proud of it."

On the broader context, he was more direct. "It feels great. Super fortunate for how we started out this summer. It's definitely extra special to have it happen at the WSOP in the wake of Krissy having a big win."

From St. Catharines to the all-time list

Kristen Foxen's career began far from the Las Vegas main stage. She grew up in St. Catharines and started playing online poker in 2006 as a college freshman, building her early bankroll through what she has described in interviews as relentless volume at the micro-stakes. Her first significant live result came at the 2013 WSOP, when she won the $1,000 Ladies Championship for US$173,922 and her first bracelet. A second followed in 2016 in the $1,500 Bounty No-Limit Hold'em event. Three online bracelets, in 2020, 2023 and 2024, brought her to five. Her sixth, eight days ago in the 2026 $25,000 High Roller, was worth US$1,773,083 and tied her with Phil Galfond, Jennifer Harman and a small group of others for the most bracelets won by a Canadian-born player.

According to figures published by the WSOP, Foxen now leads all women in all-time live tournament earnings, with cumulative winnings approaching $29.4 million. Her resume includes deep runs in the WSOP Main Event, multiple Triton Super High Roller cashes and a Women in Poker Hall of Fame induction in 2024.

The St. Catharines connection is more than a footnote. Ontario's regulated online poker market, which launched in April 2022, has produced a steady stream of pros who grind on GGPoker, PokerStars, BetMGM and the other four licensed operators before traveling to live circuits. Foxen pre-dates that regulatory framework by more than a decade, but her trajectory, online volume into live success, is the template that thousands of Ontario players are now following.

Combined: ten bracelets, a record-class household

Alex Foxen's path was different. A Boston College football recruit before poker, he turned professional in 2017 and built his reputation in high-roller fields. His first bracelet arrived in 2022 in the $250,000 Super High Roller for US$4.56 million. A second came online in 2024, followed by a third later that year in the WSOP Paradise Triton Main Event for US$3.85 million. Sunday's win in Event #44 makes four. Combined with his wife's six, the household holds ten WSOP bracelets, with three of those captured during in-person summer series in Las Vegas in 2026, 2024 and 2022.

WSOP records list only a handful of married couples with bracelets to both their names. The Foxens, with ten between them, are well clear of that field. In 2024, both won bracelets within a week of each other, Kristen online and Alex in the WSOP Europe high roller in Rozvadov. In 2026, the achievement has come at the marquee Las Vegas summer series and roughly eight days apart.

"There's definitely a little bit of frustration when that happens," Foxen said of the gap between losing and winning in tight short-stack events, "but it's still just look at the stacks, the big blinds, the position, and take it from there. Just see it one hand at a time. For me, that's the best way to remove any kind of emotional aspect from it."

Bolton's Orlando Moretti cashes one event over

While Foxen's bracelet was the headline of the day, the bigger surprise on the Ontario ledger came in the adjacent room. Event #43, the $800 8-Handed Deepstack No-Limit Hold'em, drew 3,903 entries and was won by the United Kingdom's Matthew Moss for US$318,556. In sixth place, cashing for US$64,992, was Orlando Moretti of Bolton, Ontario, a recreational senior player whose previous lifetime WSOP earnings, according to the Hendon Mob, totalled US$19,250 across eight cashes spread over nineteen years.

Sunday's finish more than tripled that lifetime total in a single tournament. Moretti, who lists Bolton, in the Town of Caledon north-west of Toronto, as his home address on WSOP registration forms, has previously cashed mainly in low-stakes seniors and double-stack events. His best prior result was a $4,600 cash in the 2024 Millionaire Maker; the next-best was a $3,074 finish in the 2015 Little One for One Drop, a charity event he played in his late forties.

The cash represents the kind of result that defines the back third of any WSOP for the broader Ontario field: not a bracelet, not a final-table victory, but a single deep run that delivers a year's worth of tournament profit for a recreational grinder. Moretti now sits comfortably inside the top 35,000 lifetime WSOP cashers, a list that runs into the hundreds of thousands, and well inside the top hundred lifetime Canadian players by cumulative WSOP cashes.

The 2026 Canadian summer, by the numbers

The 2026 series has been the strongest summer for Canadian-passport players in several years. The bracelet tally stands at three, all won within an eight-day window in early June: Frederic Normand in Event #21 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo for US$235,377, Kristen Foxen in Event #19 $25K High Roller for US$1,773,083 and Christopher Alcindor in Event #22 Big O for US$387,110. Combined gold for those three events sits at US$2,395,570.

Beyond bracelets, Clayton Mozdzen finished runner-up in Event #37 H.O.R.S.E. for a career-best US$122,206. Daniel Negreanu and Tara Dunn each posted multiple deep runs. Mike Leah remains inside the WSOP Player of the Year top 10 and is on pace to finish as the highest-ranked Canadian on the list since Mike Watson in the previous decade. Moretti's $64,992 adds to that total, pushing Canadian notable cash for the series above US$2.58 million with roughly four weeks of the schedule still to play.

What it means for Ontario players

None of Foxen, Normand, Alcindor or Mozdzen lives in Ontario today. Foxen is based in Florida with her husband. Normand and Alcindor list other Canadian provinces. Moretti is the only Ontario-registered cash on Day 22 of the schedule. The provincial story remains, in 2026 as in 2025, more about the steady volume of cash players grinding on the regulated online market than about a single celebrity face on the Vegas main stage.

That volume continues to grow. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario's most recent quarterly market report listed online poker handle at a record level for the January to March quarter, with shared-liquidity rooms covering Ontario, New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania driving the bulk of the growth. The latest Ontario poker tournament schedule shows guaranteed prize pools across the six regulated rooms running comfortably ahead of the same point last year, and GGPoker's microFestival series, which runs through June 28, has been adding to that base since its June 14 launch.

For Ontario players watching the WSOP from home this summer, the practical lesson of the Foxen storyline is the same one Foxen herself articulated: career value is the sum of many results, not a single tournament. The same logic governs a 25 NL grinder on PokerStars Ontario. Grind volume, manage variance, take the small edges. Sunday's bracelet was Foxen's first since December 2024 and his first live in Las Vegas since 2022. The body of work he referenced takes years to build.

The next domestic stop is the WSOP Super Circuit Canada, which runs August 24 through September 9 at Playground in Kahnawake with a CA$10 million guaranteed prize pool, the largest tournament series Canada has ever hosted. Players looking to qualify online without travelling to the venue can review the best poker sites in Ontario overview for the full regulated market, or check the GGPoker Ontario page for the current satellite schedule. The tournament guide covers the broader live circuit calendar across both Canada and the United States.

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