Jim Collopy Wins Second WSOP Bracelet

The 2021 World Series of Poker (WSOP) crowned a new gold bracelet winner at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino on Monday at the 2021 WSOP Event #32: $3,000 H.O.R.S.E., a tournament that drew 282 entries and offered up a $752,940 prize pool.

In the WSOP HORSE games, play cycles every six hands. This rotation is among five games. Limit Hold ’em, limit Omaha, Razz, seven-card Stud, and stud hi-lo Eights or better. Players need to be good at four of the games and lucky at razz in order to win.

With 282 entries, the post-rake prize pool came out to $752,940, of which $172,823 was earmarked for the first-place finisher.

When play closed with 20 players left at the end of Day 2, there were still enough great players in the mix that mere random selection would probably have given us a stacked final table.

Maria Ho tweeted about the strange experience of playing live again.

“That day 3 #WSOP bag hits different after playing almost no live #poker over the last two years,” Ho wrote.

Day 3 and the final table

Among those who just missed making the final table were Barbara Enright (16th — $8,200) and Brandon Shack-Harris (14th — $8,200), and the official final table bubble-boy, David Williams (9th — $13,989).

Still standing when the final table came around were Maria Ho, Daniel Negreanu, Jim Collopy, Michael Trivett, and Eli Elezra, who was the chip leader going into the final table.

Jen Harman tweeted about the table;

One by one the biggest names fell away. Negreanu took 8th, Ho took 5th, and Elezra took 4th.

In the end, only Jim Collopy and Ahmed Mohamed were left. Collopy was playing for his second bracelet. His previous bracelet was in 2013’s WSOP Asia-Pacific AU$1,650 PLO event.

Collopy went into heads up play with a substantial lead of 8.8 million chips to 2.5 million. He followed through, quickly cutting Mohamed’s stack down to just 650,000.

During a razz round, with betting limits at 120,000-240,000, Mohamed called a bet every street to turn over a 8-7-low only to be just pipped by Collopy’s 8-6-low.

Mohamed won $107,428 for his second place finish.

After a long day of play, it was 32-year-old poker pro Jim Collopy, AKA "Mr. Big Queso", coming out on top to claim a $172,823 top prize and the second gold bracelet of his career. Collopy previously won the 2013 WSOP Asia-Pacific (APAC) Event #2: A$1,650 Pot-Limit Omaha for A$69,662 ($72,903).

It was also a bit of mixed-game redemption for Collopy, who back in 2014 finished runner-up in Event #27: $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. for $142,533.

"Great, way better than getting second place," Collopy said after the win. When asked if it was a bit of redemption from his previous H.O.R.S.E. runner-up finish he smiled and replied, "Yeah, I'd say so, for sure."

"It always feels cool to win on a big stage, so I'd say that's what makes it most different," Collopy said comparing his second bracelet to the first. As for the competition, Collopy let slip a little bit of his strategy: "I definitely wanted a few players out of the way, and that definitely was incorporated into my strategy."

Collopy recently finished graduate school at the University of California San Diego this summer with a Masters of Advanced Studies in International Political Economy.

"I wanted to see if I still had it, and that was rewarding to me, to see if I still had it," Collopy said of pursuing his education. The poker pro is currently based in Denver, Colorado but splits his time between there and Las Vegas.