By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 12, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
LAS VEGAS - The Canadian piece of the 2026 World Series of Poker shifted again on Thursday night, and not in the direction the early-day attention had pointed. Clayton Mozdzen, the Calgary-based mixed-game regular known on the online tables as "ChubbyChaser" and the subject of this newsroom's Day 17 preview yesterday morning, took the chip lead at Event #37, the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E., across a full Day 2 session and bagged 3,105,000 chips for Friday afternoon's Day 3 bracelet finale. The Day 3 field of 14, on the Thursday-night chip-count post, plays a six-handed limit-rotation rotation across razz, seven-card stud, stud eight-or-better, limit Hold'em and Omaha Hi-Lo, with a US$183,366 first prize, a US$8,479 minimum payout guaranteed to each of the 14 survivors, and the fourth Canadian gold bracelet of the 2026 series on the line.
The parallel Canadian bid, Daniel Negreanu's stack at Event #36, the $100,000 High Roller No-Limit Hold'em, did not survive the same evening. The Toronto-and-Las-Vegas pro, who bagged 1,190,000 chips at the end of Wednesday night's Day 1 and entered Day 2 inside the top half of the 31-player field, fell short of the nine-handed Day 3 starting list that Christopher Nguyen of Austria leads with 17,200,000 chips. Negreanu's elimination was not noted in the published Day 17 wrap by name, and his name is absent from the final nine. The $100K High Roller, where 48 late-registered entries lifted the field to a working number for the bracelet-day prize-pool, now runs at 2 p.m. local time on Friday afternoon for a US$2,841,432 first prize and a US$255,491 minimum payout. Of the four Canadian Day 16 stacks identified in earlier coverage, only Mozdzen at the H.O.R.S.E. carries into Friday's bracelet day.
The H.O.R.S.E. Field
The 14 returning players in Event #37 sit at a fully working set of stack-to-big-bet ratios, in the 4-to-26 range, with the chip leader Mozdzen at the top of the range and the shortest stack at four big bets entering bracelet day. The published top-10 chip counts, on the PokerNews live coverage feed, are as follows.
| Rank | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Bets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Clayton Mozdzen | Canada | 3,105,000 | 26 |
| 2 | Ryan Caskey | United States | 2,340,000 | 20 |
| 3 | Joe Brindle | United States | 2,250,000 | 19 |
| 4 | Mike Wattel | United States | 2,130,000 | 18 |
| 5 | Nick Schulman | United States | 1,595,000 | 13 |
| 6 | Philip Sternheimer | United Kingdom | 720,000 | 6 |
The headline name in the chasing pack is Nick Schulman, the Poker Hall of Fame member and seven-time WSOP bracelet winner whose 1,595,000-chip stack is roughly half the chip leader's but who, on the published mixed-game commentary across the Card Player and PokerNews live-coverage archive, is the most accomplished single mixed-game player at the table by some distance. The Schulman chasing-stack scenario, on the prior comparable bracelet-day shapes of his 2014, 2017, and 2024 bracelet wins, has typically resolved on Schulman's side rather than the chip leader's. The Mozdzen-versus-Schulman head-to-head, on the implied bracelet-day shape, is the structural matchup the H.O.R.S.E.-watching audience will be tracking from the 1 p.m. local time restart.
The other notable names in the 14-handed field, by published bracelet count, are Mike Wattel, the two-time bracelet winner who took a stud bracelet in 2003 and a deuce-to-seven bracelet in 2017, and Philip Sternheimer, the U.K.-based mixed-game specialist who won the 2024 WSOP Europe Heads-Up Championship for €310,000. The 14-handed Day 3, on a single-day-to-finish basis with a published 26-big-bet starting stack at the top, on the WSOP's standardised Day 3 H.O.R.S.E. structure typically runs to bracelet between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. local time, which would put the bracelet ceremony in the early hours of Saturday morning Eastern Time. The full bracelet-day live coverage is on the PokerNews Event #37 live blog.
Mozdzen's Career Edges
Mozdzen's bracelet bid, on the published WSOP player profile, sits at the threshold of an already-strong 2026 series. The Calgary-based mixed-game regular entered this summer with 42 WSOP cashes, five final tables, and US$726,977 in career WSOP earnings. The 2026 series alone has already added a fifth-place finish in Event #20, the $1,500 Dealer's Choice that Jeff Madsen won on June 5 for US$161,057, with Mozdzen exiting in fifth for US$34,588. The Day 17 Day 2 push at the H.O.R.S.E., taking Mozdzen from second in chips at the end of Day 1 to chip lead at the end of Day 2, is on its own a single-day session that has lifted his career equity profile materially.
The H.O.R.S.E. format alignment is the structural through-line. Mozdzen's two prior fifth-place finishes at the WSOP, both in the $1,500 Dealer's Choice in 2023 and 2026, were the closest he had come on a bracelet day. The Dealer's Choice format, where each player at the table chooses the game from a 20-game menu when the button reaches them, is the broadest mixed-game format on the published WSOP schedule. The H.O.R.S.E. rotation, by contrast, is the tighter mixed-game format with the five-game cycle and is the format most closely aligned to his preferred online-cash-game stable. Mozdzen's prior strongest mixed-game result, on the published live-tournament record, is the 16th-place finish at the 2025 WSOP $25,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship for US$51,020. The $1,500-level H.O.R.S.E. bracelet, at the comparable 14-handed stage, would be the largest single live-tournament cash of his career and the first H.O.R.S.E. bracelet by any Canadian on the published WSOP archive.
The $100,000 High Roller Status
The parallel Canadian narrative on Thursday night, Daniel Negreanu's stack at the $100,000 High Roller No-Limit Hold'em, ran in a different direction. The Wednesday-night chip count post had Negreanu at 1,190,000 chips after a Day 1 double-up, in a 60-big-blind working position at the Day 2 starting level. The Day 2 session ran a full 12 levels, eliminated 22 players from the 31-handed restart, and bagged nine survivors for Friday afternoon's bracelet day. Negreanu's name does not appear on the published Day 2 chip-count post or on the Day 3 starting list. The $100K High Roller will reconvene at 2 p.m. local time on Friday for a US$2,841,432 first prize, against the standard published $100K High Roller payout ladder.
| Rank | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Christopher Nguyen | Austria | 17,200,000 | 72 |
| 2 | Yuri Dzivielevski | Brazil | 11,800,000 | 49 |
| 3 | Alexandros Theologis | Greece | 9,955,000 | 41 |
| 4 | Teun Mulder | Netherlands | 8,845,000 | 37 |
| 5 | Alex Kulev | Bulgaria | 5,550,000 | 23 |
| 6 | Martin Kabrhel | Czechia | 5,215,000 | 22 |
| 7 | Biao Ding | China | 4,750,000 | 20 |
| 8 | Sam Soverel | United States | 3,420,000 | 14 |
| 9 | Alex Foxen | United States | 2,220,000 | 9 |
The bracelet-day storyline of the $100,000 High Roller is the Christopher Nguyen lead-stack arc rather than a Canadian one. Nguyen, the Austrian-flagged regular who denied Ren Lin in heads-up at the 2026 WSOP Europe €50,000 High Roller in April, finished Day 2 at the top of the count after a key cooler hand against Artur Martirosian in late afternoon. Nguyen four-bet jammed king-queen against Martirosian's pocket aces and ran the wheel to make a runner-runner straight, on the published PokerNews wrap, doubling out of an apparent-bust scenario into a chip-leading position. Martirosian's aces were cracked a second time on the same orbit by Teun Mulder's jack-ten-of-spades, an eighteenth-place exit for the Russian high-roller regular that popped the money bubble. The Canadian observer-side question for the $100K bracelet is the relative-equity arc of Alex Foxen, the husband of Kristen Foxen, who took the $25,000 High Roller bracelet last Sunday, who survived Day 2 in ninth-place chip position with 2,220,000 chips for nine big blinds.
The Running Canadian Count
The Canadian bracelet count for the 2026 series, on the present run, sits at three gold bracelets and a combined US$2,395,570 in payouts. The Mozdzen bracelet bid at Day 18 H.O.R.S.E., if converted, would take the count to four bracelets in 13 days, against the prior-year three-week median of one to two Canadian bracelets through the same Day 18 marker. The split-pot-and-limit format weighting of the Canadian conversions in 2026 is also a notable through-line. Two of the three Canadian bracelets to date (Normand's $1,500 PLO Hi-Lo and Alcindor's Big O) were Omaha-derivative split-pot events. The third (Foxen's $25,000 High Roller) was a No-Limit Hold'em high-roller event. The Mozdzen bid, if it converted, would add a five-game mixed-rotation bracelet to the count, a format type that no Canadian has won on the published WSOP open-event archive.
| Day | Event | Canadian status | Prize (US$) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 12, Sat Jun 6 | #21 $1,500 PLO Hi-Lo | Normand wins (1st bracelet) | $235,377 |
| Day 13, Sun Jun 7 | #19 $25,000 High Roller NLH | Foxen wins (6th bracelet) | $1,773,083 |
| Day 14, Mon Jun 8 | #22 $1,500 Big O | Alcindor wins (1st bracelet) | $387,110 |
| Day 18, Fri Jun 12 | #37 $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. | Mozdzen leads final 14 | $183,366 (1st prize) |
Day 18 Bracelet Schedule
The June 12 Day 18 schedule, on the WSOP published calendar, has 10 events running across the day, including four current-bracelet finals. Event #32, the $3,000 No-Limit Hold'em, plays from 12 p.m. local with seven players returning. Event #37, the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. that Mozdzen leads, plays from 1 p.m. local. Event #36, the $100,000 High Roller that Negreanu busted, plays from 2 p.m. local with Christopher Nguyen leading. Event #33, the $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo Eight or Better Championship, plays the WSOP-streamed final from 3:30 p.m. local. Two new events open as well: Event #39, the $5,000 Seniors High Roller, opens at 12 p.m. local with David "ODB" Baker as the defending champion (the 2025 four-bracelet winner), and Event #40, the $1,500 Razz, opens at 2 p.m. local. The Day 1c of Event #34, the $500 COLOSSUS No-Limit Hold'em, opens at 10 a.m. local with a published projected entry count in the 3,000-to-4,000 range, on top of the 631 Day 1b survivors.
The Ontario Read
Mozdzen's bracelet bid, by published residence, is a Calgary one rather than an Ontario one. The Ontario read on the H.O.R.S.E. Day 18 picture is the qualifier-pipeline read this newsroom has been carrying across the 2026 series. The largest single feeder of Canadian recreational poker volume into the live tournament floor remains the regulated provincial Ontario market, and the largest single Ontario-only qualifier path into a WSOP-branded event for the rest of the 2026 calendar remains the GGPoker Ontario Stage 1, Stage 2, and Sunday Final Stage satellite ladder to the August Super Circuit Canada at Playground in Kahnawake. The Canadian player physically located in the province who wants to follow Mozdzen's open-buy-in $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. path next year will, on the present regulatory map, take a CAD-denominated cash-game roll-up through the AGCO-licensed Ontario operator base, fly to Las Vegas in late May or early June 2027, and post the buy-in at the cage in fiat or, from this Wednesday onwards, on the new WSOP-Solana payment rail that does not extend to AGCO-licensed deposits in the regulated provincial market.
The Day 18 bracelet ceremony for Event #37 is scheduled for late Friday night Las Vegas local time, which is the early hours of Saturday morning Eastern Time. The result will be the headline of this newsroom's Saturday morning Eastern Time coverage.