It happened within the early hours of this morning, or the late hours of last night, or sometime around lunch dependent on where on this planet you were watching when Martin Jacobson won the WSOP Main Event. For all of the poker world was tuned into the overall stages where, despite what were once overwhelming odds, Jacobson triumphed with a performance which will be remembered for generations, and using nothing greater than a couple of tens turned his string of near misses into ancient history.
It will have surprised some watching on television, or within the Rio Hotel itself, that this young Swede had turned a brief stack into ten million dollars, but not such a lot to people who follow the ecu Poker Tour. Whilst the stacks surrounded him cast shadows on his own, they suspected that Jacobson was hardly the kind of player to accept regardless of the poker Gods had intended to return his way. Indeed he didn't, and there has been something marvelous about that because the sun came up this morning.
First he outlasted others, each of whom can have thought they were guaranteed a larger payday once Jacobson's luck ran out. Then a very important hand, a double up, that appeared to catapult him right into a higher orbit and right into a trajectory headed directly towards the general day and three-handed play.
And so it goes that Jacobson is the most recent WSOP champion.
It's the brand new high point of a career that began back in 2008 when Jacobson reached his first final table at EPT Budapest. There he would finish in third place, turning heads as a tender Swede at the cusp of that feared generation of Scandinavian players.
What followed was that famous string of near misses, a perennial bridesmaid as EPT Live commentator James Hartigan put it with a runner-up finish at WPT Venice in 2009; a fourth place in a WSOP event in 2010; another second place finish at EPT Vilamoura that very same year, and the similar again at EPT Deauville lower than six months later. By this point Jacobson could perhaps has been forgiven for thinking that titles and trophies would remain forever out of reach, maybe even as he reached the November Nine, with the difficult and typically short-lived task of playing the second one short-stack looking ahead to him.
But then Jacobson hasn't ever been about sitting back on the poker table. If anything the near misses proved that. Never once has he been appear to lose that steely composure that may be often the unravelling of a player. Al Alvarez once said that once you let your ego into the sport you're done for. Well, Jacobson appears to stay oblivious to ego.
He now enters a brand new phase of his career, one among adulation and spent telling his story over and over. He'll now know the primary question of each interview he does for the remainder of his life. But you then wonder whether any WSOP Main Event ever cared about having one of these problem.
And while his win takes him to the top of the sport there's a guilty pleasure for the remainder of us, particularly individuals who a piece at the European Poker Tour, knowing we'll be watching him play again pack up before long. In that regard it is a win for anyone who follows the tour.
It's there we are hoping he seeks out that other title, the person who he has come so with regards to winning but which has proved so elusive. A minimum of now he knows there is not any phantom barrier preventing him from achieving it, nothing to forestall him achieving continued success. The rather conspicuous "1st" on his resume, followed by all of these zeroes, function the incontrovertible proof.
Poker has its newest WSOP Champion in Martin Jacobson. The sun is shining, and all feels well on the earth.
Stephen Bartley is a staff writer for the PokerStars Blog.
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