Super High Roller Bowl IX Title Goes to Seth Davies
There are high roller tournaments all over the poker calendar these days. It is not uncommon to see series with $10K and $25K buy-ins, and even the World Series of Poker now runs several tournaments at the $50K, $100K, and $250K levels. The PokerGO Tour itself is chock full of $10K and higher buy-ins throughout the year, mostly at the PokerGO Studio in Las Vegas.
The Super High Roller Bowl is different. It always boasts of a special $300K buy-in and attracts an elite field of pro players mixed with the occasional wealth members of the business community around the world. It also travels, as in the most recent case of offerings a SHRB in Cyprus.
Super High Roller Bowl IX
The most recent SHRB was a part of a Super High Roller Bowl Series, this one taking place at Merit Poker in Kyrenia, Cyprus. There were 24 players who put up the $300K + $6,000 buy-in to participate. That created a total prize pool of $7,056,000.
That sounds like a lot of money, but for high-stakes pro poker players, it was only enough to pay out the top four players. Jeremy Ausmus was the original short-stacked player of the final four, but German player Leonard Maue was the victim of Ausmus in several hands. After his fourth-place exit, the three stacks were fairly close until Ausmus lost some big pots and ultimately an all-in to Spanish player Juan Pardo.
Seth Davies was second in chips of the original final four but took a sizeable chip lead into heads-up play against Pardo. The latter called all-in on just the second hand of the match, but his straight wasn’t good enough to beat Davies’ nut straight. Pardo took second, and Davies won his first SHRB title.
- 1st place: Seth Davies ($3,206,000)
- 2nd place: Juan Pardo Dominguez ($1,900,000)
- 3rd place: Jeremy Ausmus ($1,200,000)
- 4th place: Leonard Maue ($750,000)
SHRB History
It’s worth taking a look back at the history of the Super High Roller Bowl, the original No Limit Hold’em version. Its list of nine winners thus far is a who’s who of high-stakes poker.
- SHRB I (July 2015) in Las Vegas: Brian Rast (USA) $7,525,000
- 43 entries
- $21,500,000 prize pool (buy-in was $500K instead of $300K)
- SHRB II (May 2016) in Las Vegas: Rainer Kempe (Germany) $5,000,000
- 49 entries
- $15,000,000 prize pool
- SHRB III (May 2017) in Las Vegas: Christoph Vogelsang (Germany) $6,000,000
- 56 entries
- $16,860,000 prize pool
- SHRB IV (May 2018) in Las Vegas: Justin Bonomo (USA) $5,000,000
- 48 entries
- $14,400,000 prize pool
- SHRB V (December 2018) in Las Vegas: Isaac Haxton (USA) $3,672,000
- 36 entries
- $10,800,000 prize pool
- SHRB VI (September 2021) in Las Vegas: Michael Addamo (Australia) $3,402,000
- 21 entries
- $6,300,000 prize pool
- SHRB VII (October 2022) in Las Vegas: Daniel Negreanu (Canada) $3,312,000
- 24 entries
- $7,200,000 prize pool
- SHRB VIII (September 2023) in Las Vegas: Isaac Haxton (USA) $2,760,000
- 20 entries
- $6,000,000 prize pool
- SHRB IX (August 2024) in Cyprus: Seth Davies (USA) $3,206,000
- 24 entries
- $7,056,000 prize pool
The most notable trend of the SHRB is the reduced number of entries. With so many extreme buy-ins and super high rollers available to players, the $300K of the Super High Roller Bowl is no longer a unique opportunity. While the SHRB title is still one that many players hope to add to their list of accomplishments, it is no longer a one-of-a-kind event.
Even the Super High Roller Bowl name has lost some of its name recognition, as it has been used in the title of entire series and other events. While the brand remains under the PokerGO umbrella, as always, the name has been used in other iterations of the event. For example, there was a Super High Roller Bowl PLO series last October, a Super High Roller Bowl Europe in 2021 that didn’t qualify as a part of the top-tier SHRB annual event, a Super High Roller Bowl Online during the pandemic and a SHRB Australia just before that. There were others as well, with only one event per year designated as the official SHRB with a Roman numeral.
To save the SHRB title and its original prestige, organizers might want to consider reserving its name for the singular annual event and rethinking its other iterations.
