Shortly after Connor Drinan won the 2021 WSOP Event #5 $1,500 Omaha Hi-Lo 8 or Better event, PokerGo Senior PR Manager Donnie Peters took to Twitter to ask if Drinan was the best Omaha player in the world. One response he got came from Twitter user Ryan Hardiman, who said “not at O/8, that’d be Ari Engel.” Engel was quick to correct Hardiman, tweeting “thanks for the compliment, but I can’t touch Connor in any game that has the word poker in it.” Humble as he may be, Engel is now the massive chip leader with five players left in the 2021 WSOP Event #9 $10,000 Omaha Hi-Lo 8 or Better Championship.
Engel eliminated George Wolff on the final hand of Day 3 to cut the remaining field down to five players and to bring his stack up to 3,485,000. The poker pro has more than double the stack of Zachary Milchman, who will enter Day 4 in second place with 1,660,000 chips.
Ari Engel has compiled over $7 million in live tournament earnings in his career. He has a staggering 186 WSOP cashes, with 67 at the World Series of Poker, 41 online and 119 on the WSOP circuit. Engel has 10 WSOP circuit rings including four Omaha-based rings. He will be looking for his second WSOP bracelet and his first in Omaha, as his bracelet win came in the 2019 WSOP Event #48 $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em tournament.
Phil Hellmuth carries a short stack on to Day 4
Phil Hellmuth’s fantastic run in the 2021 WSOP continued in this event as Hellmuth managed to advance to the tournament’s final day. Hellmuth has already made deep runs in a sixth-place finish in Event #2 and an 18th place finish in Event #7. The 15-time WSOP bracelet winner is looking to extend his all-time bracelet lead to 16 by winning a bracelet for the first time since 2018.
Unfortunately for Hellmuth, he will have a whole lot of work to do as the short stack on Thursday. Hellmuth enters the final day of the $10,000 Omaha Hi-Lo event with only 390,000 chips. He sits behind Engel with 3,485,000, Milchman with 1,660,000, Eddie Blumenthal with 1,405,000, and Andrew Yeh with 1,105,000.
The $10,000 Omaha Hi-Lo 8 or Better Championship drew 128 entrants to generate a prize pool of $1,193,600. Hellmuth and Engel will be competing for the top cash payout of $317,076 when play resumes on October 7 at 4 pm PST. The action will be broadcast on the PokerGo app.
Featured Image Credit: Flickr - WPT
