It seems like every year, we see somebody win more than one bracelet at the World Series of Poker. This year, with the 2016 WSOP not even half over yet, we now have two such players. You likely already know about Jason Mercier, who in a single week nabbed two bracelets and came one spot away from winning a third, but Ian Johns has now joined Mercier as a dual bracelet winner, taking the top prize in Event #28: the $10,000 Limit Hold’em Championship. This is Johns’ third overall bracelet in his WSOP career.
It was a fairly small field of 110 entrants, as one might expect from a Fixed-Limit Hold’em event with a $10,000 buy-in. Johns cashed for $290,635. His previous bracelet pick-up this year was a couple weeks ago in $1,500 HORSE, a tournament which earned him another $212,604.
Johns has now won more than $1.1 million in live tournaments, according to TheHendonMob.com, and interestingly, it has come almost exclusively from World Series of Poker events. Of his 24 recorded cashes, only four were not in WSOP tournaments. His biggest cash was in his first bracelet win, $3,000 Limit Hold’em in 2006. That one just beat out this week’s cash by about $1,000. Two of his live tournament cashes were in World Poker Tour events a decade ago, totaling $135,000.
As it turns out, Limit Hold’em events are right up his alley, as Johns is a Limit specialist, playing $80/$60 Hold’em virtually every day. He is a cash game pro, which might explain why his tournament results are so WSOP-heavy; if you’re going to jump into tourneys, might as well make it the biggest ones. In his WSOP interview after the tournament, Johns explained what he loves about Fixed-Limit:
For me, Limit Hold’em is a super fun game because you are constantly making decisions. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. It’s very fast. The hands take 90 seconds instead of four minutes like in No-Limit. So, you just have so many opportunities to make these little incremental decisions. I have spent the last 12 years of my life trying to perfect those incremental decisions and that’s why I like it.
Johns was also refreshingly honest about his poker abilities, adding that he sticks to Limit Hold’em because he’s just not that great at No-Limit.
“I used to play a lot of No-Limit. But these guys, they passed me by eons ago,” Johns said in his winner’s interview. “I get in the game and I don’t know what I’m doing. They’re so advanced now. I feel lost in hands, so I chose not to play, which seems like a reasonable thing to do. When I’m not playing these limit tournaments, I’m playing in cash games, which are limit.”
Yes, not playing a game in which the competition dwarfs you is certainly the reasonable thing to do. As they say, every dollar not lost is a dollar won.
Naturally, the small field and high buy-in meant that the tournament was dense with strong players. The final table consisted of four players who had already won multiple WSOP bracelets in their careers: Brian Rast, David Chiu, Bill Chen, and Brock Parker. Now Ian Johns can add his name to that list.
“I’m ecstatic. It’s so far out there,” said Johns. “I don’t even play in that many tournaments. I never dreamed of it. I never even thought about it.”