Dan Smith could be called the Phil Mickelson of Poker, after yet another close call with WSOP gold.
Smith finished in third place in the $50,000 buy-in WSOP Poker Players Championship on Tuesday — good enough for $521,782, but still oh-so-close and two places shy of winning his first WSOP bracelet (and one of the more coveted ones at that).
Early in his pro golf career, Phil Mickelson couldn’t seem to shake the “best golfer to never win a major” label prior to winning the Masters in 2004. But after finally breaking through, he went on to win four more majors and will go down as one of the greatest golfers of all-time.
(He’s currently ranked 2nd on golf’s all-time tournament earnings list, at $77 million, behind Tiger Woods at $110 million.)
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At the poker table, 29-year-old Smith has never won a WSOP bracelet even though he has $20.7 million in lifetime tournament winnings — good for 16th all-time.
He’s not alone. A small cluster of high-stakes pros, who rank between 11th and 18th on the all-time money list, have won plenty of tournament cash, but haven’t closed out one of the hundreds upon hundreds of bracelet events every year.
As we like to do, CardsChat dug through the data to show you the players who have found plenty of success at the tables, but are still waiting to feel that WSOP hardware on their wrists. The results are ordered by career live tournament winnings.
Looking at these numbers, it seems inevitable that one day, eventually, just about all of them will get there. Dan Smith, however, mathematically, is particularly overdue.
