At the 2022 World Series of Poker, the $10,000 Main Event is clearly the tournament that draws the most attention and generates the most excitement. After all, it is the most famous poker tournament in the world. But this year, a new tourney may be stealing a little bit of the Main Event’s thunder: the $1,000 Million Dollar Bounty No-Limit Hold’em event. And though thousands of amateur players took their shot at the big prize, the person who drew the lucky million-dollar bounty card was poker pro Matt Glantz.
The tournament was enormous, perhaps contributing to the capacity issues of the Main Event. There were four starting flights – the first three ran July 2-4, while Flight D was a turbo flight of just 15-minute levels (half that of the other flights) on July 4. Players could re-enter once per flight. In all, the tournament fielded 14,112 entries.
Of the $1,000 buy-in in this debut event, $300 goes to the bounty pool. Thus, the total bounty pool was $4,233,600. Unlike in other bounty tournaments, though, nobody knows the prize on anyone else’s head. In fact, tournament organizers don’t even know. That’s because there is no preset bounty list, even a secret one. Starting on yesterday’s Day 2, players who eliminate someone draw a sealed envelope from a box with their bounty prize enclosed. It’s sort of like the bonus round of Wheel of Fortune, where the contestant picks a prize from the mini wheel, but doesn’t know what the prize is until the game is over. One of the bounties was $1 million.
And it was Matt Glantz who drew the magical $1 million envelope, fairly early in the day. In some brief words after he won the grand prize, Glantz admitted that it was good to be lucky, not only with the random drawing, but also because he got all-in with Tens versus Jacks versus A-K and knocked two players out at once. Thus, he got two bounties. The first was $1,000 and the second was the big one.
The funny thing about all of this was that the night before Day 2, Glantz poked fun at the tournament and those scrambling to get into Day 1D:
After his million-dollar draw, he saw the light:
In a nice bit of sportsmanship, Glantz also gave Justin Lett, the player with Jacks that he knocked out, a small payday as a way to say “thank you,” and “sorry,” at the same time. Glantz gave Lett $5,000 of his winnings to Lett for the “vicious beat,” adding, “Figured he should be awarded $5k for the memories.”
Glantz was eventually eliminated in 42nd place, cashing for $20,730 in addition to his bounty prizes.