Editor
The 2025 World Series of Poker looked for another way to innovate and it seems they came up with a big hit with the $1,000 Battle of the Ages event. The event had two starting flights: one for players 50 years of age or older at 10 am and a 4 pm flight for players under the age of 50.
The event drew a total of 3,074 entrants and 461 of them advanced on to Day 2. Flight A drew 1,390 entrants and Flight B pulled 1,684 younger entrants. 2023 bracelet winner, Joseph Roh, bagged the lead for the older crowd with 595,00 in Flight A and Kazuhiro Shirasawa led the younger players with a late-night bag of 553,000.
Flight Breakdown
Flight A pushed on 208 older players and Flight B advanced 253 more technologically savvy players. The 21% increase for the under 50 field does not reflect unique entries – a stat that will likely not get disclosed.
Kenneth Kim, Jose Aguilera, Darren Hill and Catherine Dever landed in the top ten chip counts overall. George Wolff, Pei Li, Nicholas Peterson and Marco Guibert bagged over 300,000.
Among the top 100 chip counts from the younger field are Joao Simao, Ryan Riess, Shawn Buchanan, Jeremy Becker, Kane Kalas and Tanupat Punjarojanakul. Players like Simao, Buchanan and Kalas are known for cutting their teeth building their bankroll through online play, leaving one wondering whether they’ll tear through an older crowd of recreational players, many of whom will have never heard of solvers.
That said, Roberto Damelian, Gary Friedlander, Alan Myserson, Kunal Patni, and Larry Wright may not be names that would jump out to players, but each of these players among the chip counts for the senior flight have seven figures in cashes to their name, per their Hendon Mob profiles.
An Easier Path?
Michael Mizrachi and Eric Cloutier are interesting as they’re both well-seasoned pros with WSOP experience reaching back to the poker boom. But Cloutier turned 50 this year and the former professional hockey player theoretically had an easier path to survive Day 1.
While Mizrachi had the privilege of playing in the larger flight, he had vastly more experience than the vast majority of his flight. Did that make his flight easier to navigate?
The Day 2 field is 45% over the age of 50 and the total registration numbers matched that breakdown with 1,390 entrants. Both fields stopped play with 15% of the field remaining and that looked to be about 12 hours on the felt.
Day 2 Player Concerns
The turnaround for the under 50 crowd puts them at a strong disadvantage, with at least eight hours less of sleep time than the older crowd. The Day 2 restart is 2:00 pm PT, which gives players at most an eight-hour window for sleep. If Flight A wrapped up at 10:00 pm, that gave the advancing players 16 hours to prepare for Day 2.
But will that ratio hold as they approach the final table? According to the AARP, the 50+ crowd still has “Crystallized intelligence” – meaning that players at 50 use learned knowledge and experience to solve problems and the memory still functions at a high level.
The event is scheduled to finish on Day 2, which plays to the strengths of the younger players if there’s no hard stop for play. Generally, when the final day of play reaches ten full levels over a 12-hour period, tournament organizers enforce a hard stop, and players return the following day to finish out the action.
But the structure sheet for this event allows tournament officials to change the structure for live streaming purposes, not to accommodate the players.
