2022 WSOP: Pedro Bromfman Wins $10,000 No-Limit 2-7 Lowball Draw Championship

As someone who has written about poker and gambling for quite some time now, Pedro Bromfman is interesting to me. I feel like I’ve seen his name pop up a lot over the years, so he has clearly done something right in the world of poker, but looking up his live tournament results, he has just five career cashes (though that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had success in cash games or online). One of those cashes, though, came Sunday night, as he won the $10,000 No-Limit 2-7 Lowball Draw Championship at the 2022 World Series of Poker.

And it was one hell of a final table he had to defeat to claim the first gold bracelet of his career. He beat Scott Seiver heads-up, he of $25 million in lifetime earnings an a bracelet already this summer. Bromfman also outlasted Cary Katz (no relation), 2022 bracelet winner and 2019 Main Event third-place finisher Alex Livingston, Yuri Dzivielevski, last year’s winner Farzad Bonyadi, and 2021 Poker Hall of Fame inductee Eli Elezra.

But that was just the final table. Fourteen players made it to Day 3; those who didn’t make the final table included Dan Shak and 16-time bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth, who had taken a week off after contracting COVID-19. And just missing the money bubble on Day 2 were Daniel Negreanu, Bertrand Grospellier, and Jeremy Ausmus.

The primary reason why Pedro Bromfman has only five lifetime cashes is because he is an amateur poker player. Three of those cashes are at the WSOP, so not a bad bracelet hit rate. He came very close in 2019, finishing sixth in this same event.

After his victory, an emotional Bromfman told WSOP.com how much the win meant to him.

“It’s unreal to me,” he said. “I’m not a professional poker player. I guess my best friends are professional poker players. I play a lot of poker. It’s almost like a second job for me, but this is my favorite game. I probably played more of this game than most of the people in this field, and it’s unbelievable.”

And as we hear sometimes after someone notches a life-changing tournament win, Bromfman came close to not playing in this event. It was the age-old dad dilemma: play poker or be a family man. For some people, it would be an easy choice (poker, obviously, right…RIGHT?), but Bromfman agonized over it.

“I almost didn’t play this one,” Bromfman explained. “It was on Father’s Day. My daughter had a play today. I’m like, I shouldn’t play. I should go. But I was feeling horrible about missing it. And I said you know what? I’ll play, and maybe I’ll lose the first day. I’ll just head home. But I didn’t.”