Defending Main Event Champ Mizrachi Dominates $10K PLO Championship: Double the Chips of Second Place
Michael Mizrachi — the reigning WSOP Main Event champion — holds a commanding chip lead in the $10,000 PLO Championship with 5.6 million chips (~220 big blinds) heading into Day 4. That’s nearly double the next biggest stack. 729 entries, $7.77M prize pool, 37 players remain, and $1.35M awaits the winner. Tournament is still in progress.
What Happened
Event #70 at the 2026 World Series of Poker — the $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Championship — has been the Mizrachi show from the very first shuffle. The event drew 729 entries to generate a $7,774,800 prize pool, with the champion set to collect $1,350,203 (PokerNews).
The Day 1 hand that set the tone was absolutely absurd: Mizrachi found himself up against two opponents who each held aces and kings — essentially the best starting hand combination in PLO — and rivered a flush to crack both of them simultaneously. He bagged 946,000 chips to lead the field. Let me say that again: he beat two separate hands of aces-kings with a runner-runner flush. In any other game that’s a bad beat story. In PLO, that’s Tuesday.
By the end of Day 2, his stack had ballooned to 5.6 million — roughly 220 big blinds and nearly double the second-place player. After Day 3 play concluded, 37 players remain, and Mizrachi is still sitting on a massive chip lead (Poker.org).
The Mizrachi WSOP 2026 Storyline Is Getting Ridiculous
Context matters here. Mizrachi is the defending WSOP Main Event champion. He walked into this year’s Series wearing the heaviest bracelet poker has to offer.
But his 2026 campaign hasn’t been all smooth sailing. We covered earlier how he took a shot at his 5th Poker Players Championship title but fell short when Benny Glaser took it down. At the time, I was a bit disappointed — five PPC titles would’ve been a record that might never be broken.
Then he pivots to the PLO Championship and starts steamrolling the field. Honestly, this tracks perfectly with who Mizrachi is. The guy has always been a monster in PLO — he’s not just a Hold’em specialist who dabbles in other games. His PLO game is world-class, and it has been for years. The man has already won multiple WSOP PLO events before this one.
What This Means for Regular Players
What Mizrachi is demonstrating in this tournament is essentially a masterclass in deep stack strategy. Having 220 big blinds in PLO is a completely different game than playing a 30-40 BB short stack. With that kind of depth, you can play every street, apply pressure with 3-bets and 4-bets preflop while still having room to maneuver postflop, and you never have to get into a preflop shoving war where equity edges are thin.
I’ve played some PLO online — nothing close to these stakes, obviously — and the single biggest lesson I took away is that PLO and Hold’em are fundamentally different games wearing similar clothing. In Hold’em, pocket aces are a monster preflop and you’re happy to get it all in. In PLO, even aces with kings barely has a huge equity advantage. Mizrachi’s Day 1 hand is the perfect illustration: two opponents both had AA+KK and still got cracked by a flush. In Hold’em, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime cooler. In PLO, that’s what happens when you overvalue preflop hand strength.
The core principle of deep-stack PLO is this: position and postflop play matter far more than preflop hand quality. When stacks are 200+ blinds deep, the preflop equity differences between hands get diluted by the sheer number of postflop decisions. Mizrachi didn’t build a 5.6 million stack purely on good cards — his postflop reads and pot control at deep stack depths are operating on a different level from most of the field.
If you’re thinking about making the jump from Hold’em to PLO, here’s the one thing to internalize: PLO is a postflop game. Spend your study time on postflop pot control and range analysis rather than memorizing PLO starting hand charts. That’s where the money is.
My Take
I think Mizrachi is the heavy favorite to win this thing, and it’s not just because of the chip lead.
Chip leads change hands constantly in tournament poker — that’s not what makes me confident. What makes me think he closes it out is the mental state he’s playing from. As the defending Main Event champion, he has nothing to prove. Didn’t get the PPC? Doesn’t matter — that wasn’t his main quest this summer. That kind of psychological freedom is an enormous edge in the late stages of a tournament. While the other 36 players are sweating pay jumps and trying to survive, Mizrachi can play aggressive, fearless poker because he’s already got the biggest title in the game.
If he pulls this off, his 2026 WSOP narrative becomes: defending Main Event champion plus PLO Championship winner. That kind of dual-title combination in a single Series is extraordinarily rare in WSOP history.
Of course, this is PLO — variance is real, and one hand can flip everything upside down. But if I’m placing a bet on who lifts the bracelet when the final table wraps, I’m taking Mizrachi. The combination of skill edge, stack advantage, and mental freedom is hard to beat.
FAQ
How many entries did the WSOP $10K PLO Championship get?
729 entries, generating a $7,774,800 prize pool. First place pays $1,350,203.
What is Mizrachi’s current chip count?
Approximately 5.6 million chips (~220 big blinds) after Day 3, nearly double the next biggest stack. 37 players remain.
How did Mizrachi take the Day 1 chip lead?
He cracked two opponents’ aces-and-kings holdings simultaneously by rivering a flush, ending Day 1 with 946,000 chips as the overall leader.
What’s the difference between PLO and Texas Hold’em?
In PLO (Pot-Limit Omaha), each player receives 4 hole cards instead of 2, and must use exactly 2 of them to make a hand. The extra cards create smaller equity edges, higher variance, and far more complex postflop decisions compared to Hold’em.
Is this tournament finished?
No. As of the end of Day 3, 37 players remain and play continues. This is a progress report — final results will be covered in a follow-up article.