Monday night presented two new first-time Gold Bracelet winners in the events #41 & #43.
Event #41, the $3,000 Buy-In No-Limit Hold’em, resulted in the 1,000th bracelet to be won in the WSOP history and it was the american, former police officer and Calvin Klein menswear model, Greg Ostrander that walked away with the jewlery but also the amazing first prize of $742,072. Ostrander's WSOP records shows total winnings of $43,968 from 2011 where he ended up in the money in two events: event #58: No-Limit Hold'em Championship where he finished 232nd which gave him $40,654 and a 160th placement in the No-Limit Hold’em event #38 where he earned $3,314.
After his win, WSOP.com published a short interview with Ostrander where he answered the question What is toughest -- being a model, a poker player, or a police officer?
Ostrander replied: "The toughest is probably a poker player because you don’t have benefits thrown at you. It is a grind, you can have one large score that would set you for life, but if you do not and just have a chunk of scores the variance is so great and that is why people have a lot of backers. As far as job wise, being a cop is probably the best because financially it was fine, benefits were awesome, you had vacation and everything was there for you. But the modeling was toughest -- being out in front of people in my underwear was kind of tough!"
Event #43, the $1,500 Buy-In No-Limit Hold’em, gave the 22 year old, Broklyn born Henry Lu his first Gold Bracelet and a healthy cash prize of $654,380 for being the last man standing out of the 2,770 entrants that battled it out for three days. Henry Lu's previous WSOP merits shows a total of $15,558 in winnings from last year's event #54: $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em in which he finished at 79th place and the $1,500 No-Limit Hold'em event #18 that placed him on 56th place.
The runner up was UK's Neil Channing who, according to WSOP.com, "barely missed the chance at what would have been his long-awaited first WSOP victory". Mr. Channing's WSOP past dates back all the way to 2001 and shows total WSOP earnings of $768,531.
