Spain’s Leo Margets First Woman In 30 Years To Make WSOP Main Event Final Table

Whatever happens on Tuesday and Wednesday as the World Series of Poker plays down to its 2025 Main Event champion, history has already been made with nine players remaining.

Leo Margets does not have the biggest stack — she’s smack dab in the middle, fifth of the remaining nine — but the fact that she has a stack at all is the central story of this year’s final table.

For the first time since 1995, a woman is among the last nine players standing (sitting?) in poker’s annual championship event.

Margets, 41, is a poker veteran from Barcelona, best known as the top female finisher in the 2009 Main Event, where she placed 27th. She also won a WSOP bracelet in a $1,500 event in 2021 and was the winner in the first season of the Spanish version of the reality show The Traitors.

While Gaelle Baumann in 2012 and Annie Duke in 2000 made the unofficial final table of 10 in the Main Event, the only woman to make the final nine prior to Margets was Poker Hall of Famer Barbara Enright 30 years ago, when she placed fifth for $114,180. With today’s vastly larger fields of competitors, now an 80th-place finish pays better than that. Margets is guaranteed at least $1 million, with an upside as high as $10 million if she wins the tournament.

Did someone order a Grinder?

Margets will have some stiff competition for that payday, of course, and she has competition for the biggest story entering the final table.

That’s because Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, who won the $50,000 Poker Players Championship this summer to earn his seventh career WSOP bracelet, is among the final nine. Mizrachi has made the Main Event final table once before, finishing fifth in 2010, back in the “November Nine” era. He sits second in chips and is, by any reasonable standard, the odds-on favorite to win.

Mizrachi isn’t the only player still in the hunt who has Main Event final table experience. Belgium’s Kenny Hallaert, who is fourth in chips, made it in 2016, finishing sixth.

The chip leader entering Tuesday’s play is amateur John Wasnock of Seattle, who rallied from a position of last in chips with 17 players remaining.

Full final table chip counts:

With the chips leader sitting on only 68 big blinds and more than half the table at 33 BBs or fewer, there’s potential for a rapid pace of bust-outs and a much shorter final table than is the norm.

After a day off Monday, action resumes at 1 p.m. Vegas time Tuesday, and they’re expected to play down to three or four players before tournament officials call a halt, setting the stage for a Wednesday conclusion.

Kassouf controversy steals Saturday spotlight

For most of the weekend, the talk of the poker world was not the nine millionaires still standing, but rather a man who finished in 33rd place and bagged a payout of $300,000.

British pro William Kassouf is either a master of “speech play” or a trash-talking menace — or, more bluntly, “a hemorrhoid,” as poker writer Paul Oresteen termed him in a Substack post. He created nonstop conflict with fellow players and tournament officials throughout his deep run.

Along the way, he was punished with the imposition of a 10-second “shot clock” on every action, multiple full-round penalties, and finally, once he busted, a ban from all WSOP events at least through the end of 2025. A police escort guided him off the property.

Here’s a small taste of Kassouf’s antics as he was sent packing:

Schulman newest Poker Hall of Famer

The story of the day Friday was the announcement of the lone 2025 Poker Hall of Fame inductee, with Nick Schulman getting the nod at age 40 in his first year of eligibility.

Schulman, a popular poker broadcaster (he can be heard on the Kassouf elimination clip in the X post above), is also a seven-time bracelet winner, including one in the $10,000 no-limit 2-7 lowball draw event this summer. He burst onto the scene by winning a World Poker Tour event at Foxwoods Casino in 2005 just two months after his 21st birthday.

That payday of nearly $2.2 million remains the single largest in a tournament career that stands at more than $24 million in total earnings.

Schulman topped nine other finalists, including Ted Forrest and Mike “The Mouth” Matusow.

If Mizrachi should happen to prevail in the Main Event this week, he may very well instantly jump from a non-finalist to the favorite for induction in 2026.