By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 18, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
Daniel Negreanu survived Day 2 of the World Series of Poker's $25,000 Pot-Limit Omaha High Roller late Wednesday night and locked up a guaranteed payout of US$69,531, becoming one of 31 players to advance to Day 3 of an event that started with 329 entries and a US$7,731,000 prize pool.
The 51-year-old Toronto native, who entered Day 2 in seventh place overall with 789,000 chips, finished the day with 995,000, the 16th-largest stack at bagging. Day 3 begins at noon local time Thursday at the Paris ballroom, with blinds raising to 25,000 and 50,000 and a 50,000 big blind ante, putting Negreanu at slightly under 20 big blinds and clearly inside the danger zone but still with playable chips.
The story at the top of the leaderboard, meanwhile, has a Canadian footnote of a different kind. Alex Foxen, the New York-born husband of St. Catharines-raised Kristen Foxen, bagged the chip lead with 6,820,000, a stack of 136 big blinds. The Foxen lead arrives 60 hours after Foxen took down Event #44, the $10,000 Super Turbo Bounty, for US$594,246 and his fourth WSOP bracelet. A second bracelet in three days, in a discipline where he has no previous WSOP titles, would be a remarkable career milestone and the second piece of Foxen-household gold of the 2026 series, after his wife's $1.77 million win in Event #19 on June 7.
The Day 3 starting stacks
| Rank | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alex Foxen | United States | 6,820,000 | 136 |
| 2 | Chenxiang Miao | China | 4,310,000 | 86 |
| 3 | Sergio Martinez Gonzalez | Spain | 4,255,000 | 85 |
| 4 | Benjamin Juhasz | Hungary | 3,775,000 | 76 |
| 5 | Jeremy Druckman | United States | 3,660,000 | 73 |
| 6 | Eelis Parssinen | Finland | 3,190,000 | 64 |
| 7 | Richard Gryko | United Kingdom | 3,170,000 | 63 |
| 8 | Chongxian Yang | China | 2,830,000 | 57 |
| 9 | Levon Khachatryan | United States | 2,655,000 | 53 |
| 10 | Chance Kornuth | United States | 2,560,000 | 51 |
| 11 | Ian Matakis | United States | 2,210,000 | 44 |
| 12 | Joao Simao | Brazil | 2,045,000 | 41 |
| 13 | Ka Kwan Lau | Hong Kong | 1,965,000 | 39 |
| 14 | Artur Martirosian | Armenia | 1,710,000 | 34 |
| 15 | Bryce Yockey | United States | 1,550,000 | 31 |
| 16 | Daniel Negreanu | Canada | 995,000 | 20 |
| 17 | Biao Ding | China | 915,000 | 18 |
End-of-Day 2 chip counts, Event #47: $25,000 Pot-Limit Omaha High Roller. Day 3 returns at noon Las Vegas time, blinds 25,000/50,000 with 50,000 big blind ante. Source: PokerNews live reporting.
How the bubble burst
The bubble burst slightly after dinner break on Day 2, six hours into play, after a long stretch in which the field hand-for-handed at 50 players. The last player out without a payout was Max Neugebauer, who flopped two pair on the same board that paired Dylan Linde's nut straight. Defending champion Dennis Weiss had already busted earlier in the day. The 49 remaining cashers all locked at least US$69,531, the min cash, which under last year's identical structure rose to US$83,840 for the next pay jump and roughly US$2.3 million for the eventual winner.
Geoffrey Mooney was the last casualty before the bubble itself, busted as the field reached 69 hopefuls. The full pay schedule under WSOP convention scales roughly linearly through the back third of the money, then steepens sharply at the final table, where the top three positions account for nearly half of the prize pool.
The Foxen subplot
Foxen's chip lead is the kind of result that, on its own, would be unremarkable in any high-roller field he enters. He has more than US$48 million in tournament cashes since 2015, three career WSOP bracelets prior to last weekend (one in 2022, one online in 2024 and one at WSOP Paradise Triton in November 2024), and a regular seat in essentially every $25,000-plus buy-in event on the circuit. Sunday's bracelet, taken in the $10,000 Super Turbo Bounty for US$594,246 over a 466-entry field, was his fourth.
The remarkable element is the proximity. Foxen registered Event #47 on Tuesday morning, less than 36 hours after Sunday night's heads-up against Yixi Tang. By Wednesday night he had built a lead of more than 50 per cent over the second-largest stack and was holding 136 big blinds, more than enough to absorb the variance that PLO at this depth typically produces. The Foxen household, which sits at ten WSOP bracelets and is the most-decorated couple in WSOP history, could reach eleven by Friday night.
For Ontario, the Kristen Foxen connection has been the dominant subplot of the 2026 series. Born in St. Catharines and listed in WSOP reporting under the Canadian flag, she took down Event #19 on June 7 for US$1,773,083. Her win opened a streak of Canadian bracelets in early June that closed with Christopher Alcindor's Big O title on June 8. The household tally is sufficient that her husband's potential fifth bracelet, in a discipline (live PLO) where he has previously cashed but never won, would extend the Foxen-related story to a third major data point in eleven days.
The Negreanu run, by the numbers
Negreanu has never won a WSOP bracelet in a pure Pot-Limit Omaha event. His seven titles, won between 1998 and 2024, span No-Limit Hold'em, Limit Hold'em, Hold'em-Omaha-Eight-Stud-Eight and the $50,000 Poker Players Championship, the last of which broke an 11-year bracelet drought. A Day 3 finish in Event #47 would be his deepest live PLO run at a WSOP and his first cash of the 2026 series after registering for at least nine bracelet events through Wednesday night.
The structural picture, however, is challenging. Day 3 plays down to a final five, meaning Negreanu needs to outlast 26 players to reach Friday's final table. He starts the day with 20 big blinds at a structure that allows for short-stack maneuvering but requires aggression at fold equity edges. The deeper stacks in the field, particularly Foxen's 136 big blinds, can lever Negreanu's stack with three-bets and post-flop pressure that a 20-big-blind PLO stack rarely defends against.
Negreanu's most likely path is the standard short-stack template: open-shove or three-bet-shove with strong four-cards, fold the marginal stuff, look for one or two doubles in the first two levels to lift him into the working stack range. Twenty big blinds in PLO is roughly equivalent to twelve big blinds in No-Limit Hold'em in terms of maneuverability. Negreanu, who built his late-2010s and 2020s coaching curriculum around tournament short-stack play, has more reps with the situation than almost anyone in the field.
| Metric | Negreanu (Day 3 start) |
|---|---|
| Chip count | 995,000 |
| Big blinds | 20 |
| Field rank | 16th of 31 |
| Min payout locked | US$69,531 |
| Distance to final 5 | 26 eliminations |
| Distance to a bracelet | 30 eliminations |
| Career WSOP cashes | 266 |
| Career WSOP earnings | ~US$23 million |
| Career WSOP bracelets | 7 |
| Career WSOP PLO bracelets | 0 |
Negreanu metrics entering Day 3, Event #47.
The Canadian summer, mid-series
Through Event #47 the 2026 World Series has produced three Canadian bracelets, with combined gold of US$2,395,570. Frederic Normand won Event #21 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo on June 6 for US$235,377. Kristen Foxen won Event #19 $25,000 High Roller on June 7 for US$1,773,083, recorded under the Canadian flag. Christopher Alcindor closed the eight-day hat-trick on June 8 with the Big O for US$387,110. Clayton Mozdzen finished runner-up in Event #37 H.O.R.S.E. for US$122,206. Orlando Moretti of Bolton, Ontario added US$64,992 with a sixth-place finish in Event #43 Deepstack on Tuesday. Negreanu's locked US$69,531 lifts the Canadian notable-cash tally for the series above US$2.65 million.
Beyond the cash figures, the series has done two things for the Canadian narrative. First, it has produced the country's first three-bracelet eight-day stretch since 2013, when Mike Watson and a handful of others combined for three titles in a calendar week. Second, it has put Kristen Foxen back atop the women's all-time live tournament earnings list at approximately US$29.4 million and inside the top three of the 2026 WSOP Player of the Year standings, behind Adrian Mateos and Benjamin Tollerene.
What to watch on Day 3
Three storylines are worth tracking through Thursday. First, whether Negreanu can convert his 20-big-blind stack into a playable middle position by the second or third level, when the bigger stacks will start applying max pressure to the shorts. Second, whether Foxen can extend his lead through the middle stages, with the structure favouring chip-leader play through the first three levels of 60 minutes apiece. Third, the cluster of well-known PLO regulars in the top 15, including Chance Kornuth, Jeremy Druckman, Sergio Martinez Gonzalez and Hong Kong's Ka Kwan Lau, all of whom have multiple deep runs in the variant.
Day 3 plays ten more 60-minute levels with a goal of reaching the final five, who will return on Friday June 19 for the final-day broadcast. The remaining 26 players will reach the WSOP's PokerGO streaming feature table at varying points across the afternoon and evening. The first-place prize, projected to fall between US$1.8 million and US$2.3 million under typical WSOP $25K high-roller payout structures, will be paid in the early hours of Saturday morning local time.
Ontario players watching from home can follow the action through PokerNews live reporting and the WSOP.com final-table broadcast for free without an account. Players interested in following the WSOP Super Circuit Canada satellites at Playground in August can check the GGPoker Ontario page; the regulated market is covered on the best poker sites in Ontario overview; and the tournament schedule covers the next four weeks of regulated guarantees across all six operators in the province.