David Labchuk is having a pretty decent 2024. In May, he showed up at Deerfoot Inn & Casino for the third running of the May WSOP-C series here in Calgary and he was ready to play. He bagged his second ring in the Seniors event (his first ring also came in a Calgary Seniors event back in 2022) this past May, then followed that up with a 4th place finish in the Main Event for that series.
With his first two rings coming in Seniors events, this also marks his first ring in an open field and looks to be a stellar start for his August series. He pocketed just shy of $25k for his troubles on Wednesday, bringing his lifetime earnings close to $240k when this is updated.
It marks his seventh win on the live felt and will likely slot into 5th place in his career scores after the exchange rate is worked in.
A Growing Collection of Rings
During play at the final table of the Big 30 Stack on Wednesday, players were giving Labchuk a bit of a hard time as he was the only ring-winner at the table. At one point runner-up Colten Yamagishi mentioned that he didn’t have one yet and Labchuk quipped back “I thought everyone had a ring.”
Later, Labchuk joked about a ring for every finger and then made good on that goal, pushing through for the win and his third bit of jewelry from Calgary. With this latest ring it means he needs only one more to cover all the fingers on one hand, and two more to add the thumb as well. Several iterations of this series over the years have produced double winners in the same series — Peter Darlington did it this past May, in fact — so it’s with this huge start, it seems possible he could grab #4 before this series closes next week.
Marathon Win
It was a bit of a marathon for the Big 30 Stack with play lasting for almost 15 hours. The cards went in the air at 11 am and the final hand was dealt just before 2 am.
It was actually a reasonably short final table in the grand scheme of things. Weston Pring was the bubble to the unofficial 10-handed final table just before 11 pm and the game was decided about 3 hours later.
from a very short stack to take 5th in the
Big 30 Stack
One of the other stories to emerge from the final table was the short-stack play of Dallas Jankowiak. He was on the short stack for most of the final table, but managed to find a couple of doubles when he was down to less than 5 big blinds. That let him survive and ladder two spots for a very respectable 5th place finish.
Chris Vermette was the next to exit the final table in 4th setting up three-way action between Labchuk, Yamagishi, and Scott Calvank. Calvank and Labchuk were side-by-side and ended up in quite a few scrappy blind-on-blind battles that, eventually, Labchuk got the best of as he sent Calvank to the curb in 3rd place and gave him about a 2:1 lead in heads up over Yamagishi.
While the two played a lot of small-ball poker during the heads-up phase, it was still a fairly quick affair ending in a HU cooler where Yamagishi open-shoved the short stack with a suited king but ran into ace-ten for Labchuk. The ace came on the turn to end it all and give Labchuk his third Calgary ring, the second of 2024, and first in an open field.
Action continues through August 19th here at Deerfoot Inn & Casino for WSOP-C Calgary August, so there is lots of time to get here and get into the games. PokerPro is hosting coverage of the series powered by Main Event Travel and you can get a full look at the daily action from our tournament hub page.
