Daniel Negreanu Doubles in WSOP $100,000 High Roller as Clayton Mozdzen Sits Second in $1,500 H.O.R.S.E., Setting Up Two Canadian Day 17 Bracelet Bids

By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 11, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen

LAS VEGAS - The Canadian piece of the 2026 World Series of Poker shifted again on Wednesday night. Three days after the Normand-Foxen-Alcindor cluster on Saturday, Sunday and Monday produced three Canadian bracelets in 72 hours, two further Canadian players are now positioned to add to the running 2026 series tally. Daniel Negreanu, the most prominent Canadian name in modern tournament poker and a longtime resident of Toronto and Las Vegas, bagged 1,190,000 chips for Day 2 of Event #36, the $100,000 High Roller No-Limit Hold'em, after doubling his 600,000 starting stack across a single Day 1 session. Clayton Mozdzen, the Calgary-based mixed-game regular known as "ChubbyChaser" on the online tables, bagged 383,000 chips for Day 2 of Event #37, the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. The two stacks set up two Canadian Day 17 bracelet bids on the same Thursday afternoon, in two events with materially different shapes, fields and stakes.

Negreanu in the $100K High Roller

The $100,000 High Roller No-Limit Hold'em, the second-priciest open No-Limit Hold'em event of the 2026 summer schedule after the $50,000 High Roller that Santhosh Suvarna of India won on Wednesday night for US$1,992,870, drew 67 entries on Day 1 and bagged 31 players for Day 2. The Ren Lin storyline, on the PokerNews Day 16 wrap, dominated the early Day 1 narrative. Lin, the Chinese-flagged high-stakes regular whose live tournament profile crossed US$19.6 million in career earnings ahead of this event and who has produced three runner-up finishes at bracelet-awarding events without a gold trophy, bagged 3,175,000 chips. Galen Hall of the United States sits at 2,525,000 in second, Mikita Badziakouski of Belarus at 2,255,000 in third, and a deep stack list of names including Jason Koon, Sean Winter, Vinny Lingham, Nick Petrangelo and Artur Martirosian rounds out the top ten.

Negreanu's 1,190,000-chip bag, at 60 big blinds entering the published Day 2 starting level, is a working stack rather than a chip-leading one. The double-up, by Negreanu's own brief mid-day comments to the WSOP live update feed, came on a single key flip in late afternoon. The 67-entry field, on the prior published 2026 series prize-pool tables, generates a US$6.5-million pool, a final-table average payout in the high six figures, and a first-place prize that has historically sat just under US$2 million for similar 60-to-80-entry $100K High Roller fields. Day 2 begins at 1 p.m. local time on Thursday afternoon, with late registration open until the end of Level 12 at approximately 3:15 p.m. Play is scheduled to run down to a single winner across the next two days, with a bracelet ceremony pencilled for Friday night.

The Canadian angle on Negreanu's $100K bid is the layered one. Negreanu is, on the published WSOP profile, the all-time tournament earnings leader among Canadian players, at career earnings of roughly US$59 million across 14 calendar years of major-circuit activity. His 2026 series, on the present arc, has been characterised by deep cashes without a winning conversion. We covered the eliminated arc in our May 31 round-of-16 piece on Event #7 Heads Up Championship, the late Day 8 chip lead in our June 3 Day 8 piece, and the Day 10 elimination in our June 4 final-13 piece. The $100K, by Negreanu's own running content across the @realkidpoker accounts, is a structurally different challenge from the lower-buy-in NLH events that he has been more accustomed to making deep runs in across 2025 and 2026.

Mozdzen in the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E.

The $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. event, an open-buy-in mixed-game freezeout combining limit Hold'em, Omaha hi-low, razz, seven-card stud and stud eight-or-better in a rotation, finished Day 1 on Wednesday night with 10 levels of play and a returning Day 2 field that includes the Calgary-based Mozdzen on the second-highest stack. Daniel Makowsky of Switzerland leads with 390,000 chips. Mozdzen sits second on 383,000, ahead of two-time bracelet winner Stephen Hubbard of the United States in third on 312,500 and a top-ten populated by mixed-game specialists from France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Two-time WSOP bracelet winner Scott Clements sits eighth on 232,000.

Mozdzen's H.O.R.S.E. stack is the second meaningful 2026 series cash he is in line to add to his career profile. His Hendon Mob-equivalent figures, from the published WSOP player profile, sat at 42 career WSOP cashes, five final tables and US$726,977 in earnings entering this summer. The 2026 series alone has already produced one final-table cash, a fifth-place finish in Event #20, the $1,500 Dealers Choice that Jeff Madsen won on June 5 for US$161,057, with Mozdzen exiting in fifth for US$34,588. The H.O.R.S.E. event, on Mozdzen's career edges, is the format that fits his profile most tightly. His July 2025 result at the $25,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship, where he finished 16th of 150 for US$51,020 in his largest career mixed-game cash, is the publicly closest comparable.

The mixed-game specialist profile is a different commercial proposition from the No-Limit Hold'em open-event grinder. The split-pot, limit-stake, format-rotation environment of H.O.R.S.E. rewards multi-discipline expertise built across thousands of online hands rather than the post-flop game-tree depth of large-buy-in No-Limit. Mozdzen, by his own admission on the published mixed-game commentary on the cardplayer.com Dealer's Choice live coverage feed, prefers the formats that other regulars find more technically taxing. The H.O.R.S.E. event, with its limit-stake structure, plays to a slower wave-and-current rhythm than the $100K No-Limit Hold'em High Roller that Negreanu sat for on Wednesday night. The bracelet ceremony, on the published schedule, is set for Friday night.

The Canadian Picture Through Day 17

Canada's running 2026 series bracelet count, after the Normand-Foxen-Alcindor 72-hour cluster between Saturday and Monday, sits at three gold bracelets and a combined US$2,395,570 in payouts across Frederic Normand at Event #21, Kristen Foxen at Event #19, and Christopher Alcindor at Event #22. The two Day 17 bids in play on Thursday, the Negreanu $100K High Roller and the Mozdzen $1,500 H.O.R.S.E., are the next published Canadian opportunities for additional gold. Negreanu's $100K bid, if it converted, would be the largest single Canadian payout of the 2026 series so far on a first-place dollar basis, given the prize-pool size and the relative thinness of the late-stage field. Mozdzen's H.O.R.S.E. bid, if it converted, would be the first H.O.R.S.E. bracelet by a Canadian on the published WSOP archive.

The broader Canadian Player of the Year picture, on the latest published WSOP POY leaderboard, has Toronto's Mike Leah at #6 with 1,298 points and a $30K Super Main Event Package on the leaderboard reward tier. Leah is on the back of his Rounder Cup win at the WSOP Europe in Prague in April for €292,000, his second career bracelet. Kristen Foxen sits at #10 with 1,196 points, on the POY page filed under United States residency despite her Canadian-born and longtime Toronto-amateur profile, with the Vegas residence the determining factor on the official WSOP POY accounting. Normand sits at #31 with 1,001 points and the $5K Circuit Championship Package tier. Alcindor's Big O bracelet will likely place him inside the top 50 on the next published update, with the formal point assignment due in the next 24 to 48 hours. The composite Canadian profile, across the four top-50 placements, is the strongest opening-three-week POY count for the country in the modern WSOP era.

The Ontario Read

None of the two Canadian Day 17 stacks is, by published residence, an Ontario resident. Negreanu lists Toronto as his Canadian residence with Las Vegas as his primary working base, Mozdzen lists Calgary as his Canadian residence. The Ontario read on the Day 17 picture is the qualifier-pipeline read. The structural argument that the regulated provincial Ontario market is the largest single feeder of Canadian recreational poker volume into the live tournament floor remains the through-line of this newsroom's June 8 piece on the GGPoker Ontario Super Circuit Canada satellite path to the August event at Playground in Kahnawake. The Ontario-only Stage 1, Stage 2 and Sunday Final Stage qualifiers awarded the first batch of WSOP Super Circuit Canada main event seats on Sunday night.

The Solana piece this newsroom carried on Wednesday morning sits as the structural counterpoint. The WSOP cage in Las Vegas, from Wednesday onwards, accepts Solana cryptocurrency tournament buy-ins through the new MoonPay-bridged integration. The regulated Ontario operators remain barred from the same payment rail under AGCO Registrar Standard 5.69. The Canadian player physically located in the province who wants to follow Negreanu's $100K High Roller path or Mozdzen's $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. path next year will, on the current regulatory map, take a CAD-denominated satellite qualifier through the AGCO-licensed Ontario operator base and then either pay cash at the cage or use the new Solana rail at the Las Vegas Horseshoe and Paris. The two paths run in parallel and meet at the cage in Las Vegas. The 2026 WSOP Main Event begins on July 2.

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