Scotty Baybee!!

After 5 previous WPT final tables, "The Prince of Poker" Scotty Nguyen took down his first WPT Championship at Gold Strike! The poker gods were definitely looking down on the phenom early as his set of 4s were rivered by Michael Mizrachi's nut straight only for "The Miz" to accidently show his cards to save about 90% of Scotty's chippies. With luck like this, you are probably destined to win. Other than this hand, I don't recall a sick/bad beat televised for this episode. Great poker with lot of bluffing as Raul Paez was everybody's whipping boy!

The lucky jade of Scotty vs. Gavin Smith's new lucky charm of the buddah would clash head-on as Smith's Q-7 took Nguyen's 7-5 to the flop where both players hit top pair of 7s and get all their chips in. A duece pairs the board on the turn giving Scotty some "chop" outs with a King or an Ace or a five to win and low and behold, a King rivers and Scotty celebrates as if he'd won the pot. Probably the happiest chop pot I've ever seen.

Headups featured Mizrachi vs. Nguyen and how ironic that Mizrachi could have severely crippled Scotty earlier on. One hand was only needed as "The Prince Of Poker picked up an AQ of spades on the button and pops it. "The Grinder" gets dealt AJo and recaps it to about 1.2 million as Scotty then puts the rest in (remember the saying don't go broke with a queen in your hand, well not for Scotty baybee!!) and Mizrachi has to call. Scotty hits an overkill flush on the river and finally gets the monkey off his back!

Interesting notes:

Nguyen and Mizrachi both made the final table at the previous year's event which was the 1st time ever on the WPT that 2 players have ever accomplished. Congrats to both.

Last year's 1st place prize that John Stolzmann won was over $1.51 million compared to Scotty's win this year of $969,000. This is the biggest drop I've seen so far in the prize pool/entrants from last year's event to this year's event but every other event has increased.