Prescott, Arizona's Robert McMillan has added his name to the record of World Series of Poker gold bracelet winners by capturing Event 52 of the 2021 WSOP, the $1,000 Seniors No-Limit Hold'em Championship, on Monday. McMillan topped a 5,404-entry field in an expanded Seniors event that stretched over five full calendar days.
McMillan collected the largest payday of his poker career, $561,060, in capturing the 2021 Seniors event. It's the fourth straight "live" WSOP in which McMillan has cashed in the Seniors tourney, a closed-field event where only players aged 50 and up may compete. McMillan's 10 career WSOP cashes also include Main Event paydays in both 2017 and 2018.
Including all those other Seniors and Main Event cashes, McMillan had still barely topped $100,000 in career WSOP cashes before Monday's huge win. He's also cashed in numerous other tournaments, primarily in Las Vegas and at his unofficial home poker room, at Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. McMillan's career recorded poker tourney winnings now total more than $900,000.
Final-day surge locked in McMillan's bracelet win
McMillan was well back among the 16 players who survived into the Seniors event's final day. He began on Monday in 11th place among those 16 players. He managed to dodge the day's early eliminations, but didn't garner many more chips in Monday's first levels. When the nine-player final table was set, McMillan was in eighth, but with barely more chips than he'd had to start the day.
Meanwhile, Christopher Cummings and Dennis Jensen had both built stacks of more than 20 million, dwarfing McMillan's six-million-chip stack. Then the table went topsy-turvy. Cummings and Jensen took several large hits and exited in fifth and sixth, respectively. McMillan won several large pots to climb the standings, while Robert Davis jumped to a sizable lead as the final reached its latter stages.
The Seniors Championship ended up being a battle between three Arizonans, in McMillan, Davis, and Daniel Stebbins. Davis held over two-thirds of the chips as their three-way battle began, but McMillan flopped a flush against Davis for a key double-through that paved the way for his win. The final hand found Davis applying maximum pressure to McMillan with an underpair (fours), moving all in in when they had essentially even stacks. McMillan had a better underpair (queens) on a Q-2-8-K board. When McMillan found the nerve to call -- and then sweated out the river card, another king -- he had his massive, come-from-behind win.
Event 52, $1,000 SENIORS No-Limit Hold'em Championship – Final-table results
- Robert McMillan (United States) - $561,060
- Robert Davis (United States) - $346,743
- Daniel Stebbins (United States) - $263,640
- Jonathan Ingalls (United States) - $201,753
- Christopher Cummings (United States) - $155,401
- Dennis Jensen (United States) - $120,484
- Louis Cheffy (United States) - $94,030
- Todd Hansen (United States) - $73,873
- Daniel Lujano (United States) - $58,425
Featured image source: WSOP.com
