PokerStars seems to have a remarkable talent for picking winners. On Nov. 8, Pius Heinz became the fourth straight PokerStars-sponsored player to win the World Series of Poker Main Event, following Jonathan Duhamel, Joe Cada and Peter Eastgate into the record books. Not only that, PokerStars recruited Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer and Joe Hachem to endorse the site after winning world championships of their own from 2003 through 2005.

Heinz was the only member of the 2011 November Nine to sign on with PokerStars. He joined the team on Nov. 4, and won the tournament four days later. Coincidence? Not if history has anything to say about it.

Let's take a look at the world champions that have donned the PokerStars logo over the past decade.

2003

Chris Moneymaker wasn't wearing PokerStars gear when he won the WSOP Main Event in 2003, but he earned his seat to the tournament through a $39 satellite on PokerStars and parlayed that into a $2.5 million payday. It was then that the poker world changed forever.

Moneymaker's victory sparked a tidal wave of interest in poker all over the world. The "Moneymaker effect" spurred poker amateurs to try their hand online at PokerStars and helped the site grow into the leading poker room that it is today. He was among the first members of Team PokerStars and is now one of the game's most identifiable ambassadors.

2004

Like Moneymaker, Greg Raymer was one of the original members of Team PokerStars Pro after his WSOP Main Event title in 2004. Before becoming a household name at the poker table, Raymer was a full-time patent attorney whose wife let him use $1,000 as a poker bankroll. He then went on the rush of a lifetime that included winning a seat into poker's most prestigious tournament via a PokerStars qualifier. A short time later, he defeated current PokerStars Team Pro David Williams heads-up to win the coveted WSOP Main Event bracelet and $5 million. PokerStars then signed Raymer to its pro team as the "Fossilman."

2005

PokerStars secured the "triple crown" in 2005 when it signed 2005 WSOP Main Event champ Joe Hachem. It was the third straight year that PokerStars had locked up a world champion. The relationship had extra meaning for PokerStars because Hachem was the firstAussie to win the title and his instant fame helped the game's popularity expand Down Under.

"This entire experience has been a dream come true for me," Hachem told the PokerStars Blog after joining the team. "To join Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer is a real honor. I hope that my association with PokerStars.com will encourage others out there to pursue their goals in life, whatever they might be. It sure worked out for me."

2008

After a two-year hiatus (we'll call it a glitch in the matrix), 2008 WSOP Main Event champion Peter Eastgate joined the Team PokerStars just in time for the 2009 World Championship of Online Poker. Eastgate was the first player to win the WSOP while wearing the PokerStars logo. 2008 WSOP Main Event runner-up Ivan Demidov also signed a deal with PokerStars in 2009 and is still a member of the team to this day.

"Ever since you saw the two sit down face-to-face for the epic World Series battle, you somehow knew they would end up in the elite Team Pro stable," said PokerStars Blog writer Brad Willis. "It was just a matter of when it would happen."

2009

PokerStars snagged Joe Cada before the November Nine returned to Las Vegas for the finale. Due to a new WSOP rule that prohibited more than three players wearing logos of any one individual site at a televised final table, PokerStars was relying on Cada, Eric Buchman and Kevin Schaffel to keep the train moving.

Sure enough, Cada broke Eastgate's record as the youngest winner of the WSOP Main Event (previously held by Phil Hellmuth for two decades). The Team PokerStars stable was becoming crowded with WSOP champions of all ages, and a winning trend was materializing.

2010

Another year, another champion at PokerStars. Jonathan Duhamel won his WSOP Main Event seat online at PokerStars and ultimately claimed the $9 million prize while wearing the PokerStars red spade. Two months later, he officially joined Team PokerStars as a sponsored pro.

"It's a dream come true," Duhamel told the PokerStars Blog.

Duhamel's victory made him the first world champion from Canada and he was immediately a national hero. Team PokerStars pro Daniel Negreanu was Canada's shining poker star prior to 2010, but Quebec's Duhamel was on top of the poker world for at least one year.

2011

22-year-old Pius Heinz was seventh in chips going into the 2011 WSOP Main Event final table, but PokerStars had a sense that the German player was special. He joined Team PokerStars just two days before the November Nine reconvened in Las Vegas, and was the last player standing on Tuesday after a marathon heads-up match against Martin Staszko.

Heinz became the first German player to win the WSOP Main Event and, like Hachem and Duhamel before him, gained instant celebrity in his native country. He was a longshot to win, but we're discovering every year that nobody wearing the PokerStars logo can be counted out at the World Series of Poker Main Event.

We've come to expect a show at the World Series of Poker final table. Frozen in ice since July, the November Nine format is then thawed out to return months later for an explosive showdown. It's still held in Las Vegas at the Rio, but action shifts to the Penn and Teller theatre, allowing for big crowds, a raucous atmosphere and excitement to send the temperature soaring.

Yesterday was no different. Nine players returned for their shot at the $8,711,956 first prize and title of world champion. PokerStars had its new star on show, Germany's Pius Heinz, who joined Team PokerStars Pro only last week.

He started the day seventh in chips and plenty of work to do. But after 10.5 hours, when play halted with just three players remaining, Heinz was not only still there, he was chip leader.

Here is how the three remaining players will sit down when we play down to a winner tomorrow (Tuesday):

Pius Heinz, Germany, Team PokerStars Pro, 107,800,000
Ben Lamb, USA, 55,400,000
Martin Staszko, Czech Republic, 42,700,000

And here are the final table payouts so far:

4 Matt Giannetti, $3,012,700
5 Phil Collins, $2,269,599
6 Eoghan O'Dea, $1,720,831
7 Bob Bounahra, $1,314,097
8 Anton Makiievskyi, $1,010,015
9 Sam Holden, $782,115

With more than half the chips in play, then, Heinz is in the box seat to return another PokerStars world champion, following in the recent footsteps of Jonathan Duhamel, Joe Cada and Peter Eastgate.

But if he fails to attain the biggest crown in poker, he can be proud of his immense final table performance so far - while the $4,021,138 he's already locked up in prize money will be a rather pleasant consolation.

Good luck tomorrow, Pius!

If you went to a restaurant and the menu featured only one item, the task of ordering might be boring, but it would be easy. Conversely, try ordering from a menu with 250 items on it. It's a epicurean adventure but making the decision can freeze some people in their ordering tracks. The paralysis of choice can be a real toughie.

Consider the problem being faced by some well-known poker players today. There are 14 people left in the WSOP $10,000 7-card stud championship. Four of them are Team PokerStars Pros. For at least two of those people, their success has caused them a real problem.

As play ended in the Stud championship early this morning, Chad Brown, Ville Wahlbeck, Jason Mercier, and Betrand "ElkY" Grospellier all had chips. Mercier and ElkY found themselves in a pickle.

Mercier had been two-tabling the $1,500 PLO (which he won last year) and the $10,000 Stud event. When he finally busted the PLO 50 from the money, he focused on the Stud event and finished sixth out of the fourteen remaining players. Meanwhile, ElkY managed to work his stack up to third out of fourteen.

For anyone else in the world, this would be reason to run directly to bed, take an Ambien, and crash in advance of a great chance for a big gold bracelet. Mercier, however, took to Twitter and lamented his fate.

"Finished for the night. Can't decide if imma play the 5k shootout at noon tomorrow," he wrote.

For readers here, that probably doesn't need much translation, but I'll do it anyway. Sometime in the middle of the Vegas night, Mercier was finishing in the top half of the final 14 of the Stud championship. His first thought was whether he could skip out on sleep and make it back in time for the $5,000 NLHE shootout starting in a few hours.

But Mercier is a sicko. We all know that. The guy will go for days without sleep just to make sure he has a chance at winning everything. It's simply how he operates. There isn't anybody else out there who...

Well, yes, there is ELkY. Seconds later, the Frenchman was responding, "I can't decide either. So sick. First Day 3 of the Series and might miss one of the best events!" Ed. note: Tweet has been autocorrected by the fingers of a guy who can't deal with lack of punctuation in a tweet).

So, here's two young guys who could make it back to their rooms, get a solid eight hours sleep, and still have time to have a healthy breakfast before the 3pm re-start of the Stud event. Or, it's two young guys who could go back to their rooms, sleep for a few hours, and make it back by noon to multi-table the $5,000 shootout and Day 3 of the $10,000 Stud.

Mercier says he's decided to get the rest. "Might as well get some extra sleep and then mash Day 3 tomorrow," he wrote.

ElkY hasn't indicated what he's going to do. If you know ElkY, you probably know where you should put your money.

In any case, good luck to Mercier, ElkY, Chad Brown, and Ville Wahlbeck when they get back to work at 3pm in the Stud championship.

And good luck in the $5,000 shootout, too. Sickos.

The countdown has come to an end. The first of June has finally come! Our plane to Las Vegas is waiting at the gates of Brussels airport ready to take us to the city of sins. At 6:30 in the morning we start packing our bags. Although we didn't catch a lot of sleep, we aren't really as edgy as we normally are when leaving for a long trip in the early morning.

We arrive at the Airport at about 8:45, well in time. Our flight only leaves at 10:55 so we have all the time in the world to get some food and relax a bit. At that moment we get our first beat of the day. Off all the planes departing that morning, our flight is the only one that has a two hour delay. To avoid getting tilted we decide to upgrade to business class. It's only $500 each to get the upgrade, and for such a long flight, $500 is well worth it. So in the airport, we wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. Christophe goes KO in the VIP lounge and then finally at 12:15 we can go to the departure gate. Flying business class is pretty cool. It was actually the first time we did it on a long distance flight, and to be honest, it tastes like more. The chairs are almost as comfortable as beds and you get served very well. The stewardess asks you if you want a drink every five minutes, you get eatable food and they laugh with every joke you make. Travelling in style, we like.

We have a scheduled stop in Chicago where we have to wait for 4.5 hours to get our connecting flight to Vegas because of the previous delays. And 4.5 hours at an airport, again, is a pretty damn long time. Good thing we find a place where we can charge our laptops. So on some very uncomfortable, almost human-unworthy iron seats, we watch "The Sopranos" and the clock ticks time away a little faster.

Then finally it's time. Our plane is ready to take off. We enter, take our seat, pass out and wake up when the plane hits the ground. This is it. We arrive in Sin City. Now we get a second bad beat: Sybe our friend who is coming to pick us up from the airport has a car accident at 5 miles/hour. Nothing severe, but still the police, ambulance and even fire workers come to the scene where it happened to make sure he can't get to the airport to pick us up. Not a big deal, we just take a taxi, give the driver the address and we are on our way to the house. Oh wait, bummer, the taxi driver is not familiar with the address.

So he starts messing around with his GPS system that he's apparently using for the very first time. This guy is even worse with electronics than our own dad, "Bobbybusto". It's pretty tilting that the last part of the trip gets prolonged so annoyingly, but after some detours, driving in circles for $30, the driver sees the light and boom, ee arrive at the house!

The house we are staying at is amazing. It has seven bedrooms that all have their own bathroom. It has a big kitchen and a nice living room with a knight guarding the place. In the basement we have a chill & relax room with pool table, poker table and a home cinema. Outside we have a big pool, a Jacuzzi and a guest house.

A nice thing to note as well is that the house comes with a crazy hummer-style limousine named "The Kong" that drives us to the Rio where the WSOP tournaments are played every day.

The next day Matthias - alias "Action-Jackson" - jumps right into a $1,600 Deep Stack at the Venetian trying to go for success on the very first days of the trip. This doesn't really work out. Five hours after sitting down, he busts, gets back up and decides to hit the cash tables. The cashgames in Las Vegas are super-juicy. It's almost like the PokerStars cash game lobby. You can choose from hundreds of games trying to find a money table. The cashgames go very well the first couple of days. Matthias crushes the $10-20 games even taking shots at $10-20-40 in the Belaggio which is a huge game.

Unfortunately he gets unlucky in a big pot to Masa Kagawa, the rich Japanese businessman and high stakes player. This forces him to move back down in stakes and get back to the grind. In the meanwhile Christophe is very successful at the deep $2-5 games. Not seeming able to have a losing session, he's now up a ton and soon moving up to $5-10.

But being a poker player is not only about going strong in cashgames. Like all the other thousands of poker players coming to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, we register in multiple WSOP events, as well as Venetian Deep Stack tournaments in order to reach the highest glory, winning a tournament or even better, winning a bracelet!

The poker gods aren't really helping this first week. Everytime we are in stackin' chips mode, the pot for the chiplead goes the wrong way. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Matt finishes in 94th place in the $1500 WSOP Triple Chance and as we speak is making a deep run in the $2,500 Venetian Deepstack. Will he outlast the entire field and go for king?

Read all about it by following us on twitter: @Crispokers and @mattionfire

Or follow us on our Facebook Page.

See you guys next week!

Victor Ramdin doesn't scream. He doesn't call for the cameras. He doesn't dance around a room and declare himself the best. Ramdin gets it quietly and lets his record speak for itself. As a result, it's rare to see banner headlines with his name included. To make that happen, Ramdin has to be doing something fairly significant.

So, this morning when ESPN's poker Twitter feed mentioned Ramdin's name, it became clear that's the Team PokerStars Pro from the Bronx is again being noticed outside the PokerStars Blog realm. He's once again letting his game speak for him.

With the 2011 World Series of Poker only a couple of weeks old, Ramdin is still alive and in the money in the $1,500 HORSE event. Already guaranteed more than $7,000, Ramdin is marking his fourth cash of this year's WSOP. With 17 players remaining, Ramdin sits in eighth place.

Ramdin's WSOP resume goes back to 2003 when he notched his first Series cash. His 20th place finish in a pot-limit hold'em tourney earned him less than $4,000. Since then, he's put up 22 total WSOP cashes worth more than $300,000.

Ramdin is no stranger to HORSE, either. In 2008, Ramdin made the final table of this same event. He placed 7th for more than $32,000. If Ramdin manages to make the final table today, it will be his fourth in the past eight years.

Good luck today, Victor, in the chase for your first WSOP bracelet.

I was walking out of a professional tennis match in February when I received a call from ESPN. They wanted to know if I would like to relive one of the biggest days in my life and play Sam Farha heads up again on the WSOP stage. Under the lights. On TV. It didn't take but a second to say yes. I thought this would be fun first off, but also wanted to see the difference eight years makes.

I haven't seen much of Sammy in the last eight years and didn't know what to expect from his game. I knew my game had improved a lot since that magical day. In 2003, my plan was to apply pressure and take any 50-50 shot I could to bust him. I felt outclassed in 2003 and most certainly was, but I had a strategy to negate his experience and it paid off.

Fast forward eight years. I feel very confident going into this match, and feel like I am the better player today. I have put a lot of time in to improve my game and played many heads up matches against top competition online at PokerStars. I knew going in, this game was going to play out differently than 2003, in that I would be more patient and control the action more than I was able to do in 2003. I felt good, but had zero idea what Sammy's game was like eight years later and was eager to find out.

The format of this match would be the best two out of three matches. The first match would be starting chips from the final hand at the 2003 WSOP (5.4 million for me and 2.9 million for Sam). The second match would be flipped stacks and the final would be even stacks. After some thought I felt I had the worst of the structure since I am playing someone I haven't seen in years. I was supposed to win the first match having the lead to start with. However, in a heads up match, the longer you play the more you learn about your opponent. I thought having the big stack first was a disadvantage in that I would know more about Sammy in the 2nd and 3rd match when I had a shorter stack.

That being said, I felt comfortable that I could play my game and come out on top.

I didn't know what to expect from Sammy. Was he going to go all 2003 and try to run me over? Would he be very sticky throughout hands? Or had his game changed completely? I really felt going in that I was not going to be able to bluff him but would be able to make large very thin value bets. Given what I knew of Sammy, my plan was to play pot control, play position, and get value from made hands.

Match #1

Sam started with the button and we were off in our historic heads up match. The blinds would be 20k-40k with a 5k ante. First hand out Sammy sends a message; Raise to 200K! Sammy was here to gamble and apply pressure I thought. My first thought when Sammy opened the first three pots with 5x raises was GG Sammy. If Sammy were going to continue this line of play, he would be chewed up. I was shocked to see the big raises and it actually put me at ease. After five minutes, I knew I had a better than average chance to win the match. Sammy applied pressure and I made some light calls early in to see how he was playing different hands. The match got to about even in chips which was not good obviously, but in the process I picked up some valuable info. Sammy was overplaying hands and paying off every bet I made as well. I made a few adjustments and the match quickly went in my direction. I got him down to 11 big blinds and got it all in bad with an A8 vs and AT. This hand plays itself with 11 big blinds, I was happy to call his shove here and expect to have the best hand more than 50% of the time. As it turns out I had to get lucky, did so on the turn, and took the first match 1-0.

Match #2

I was super confident going into match 2, even with the short stack. Sam used his stack very well and took about half my stack in the early going. Sam had changed his strategy to open limping the button with every hand except premium holdings. Gus Hansen recently used the strategy and I am sure it has its merits, I don't think it is an effective playing style. It was a big change from the first match and I commend Sammy with completely changing his style and making me play a different game in Match 2. The limping took me off guard but, I made a few changes and got back in the match. I ended up taking the lead in the match and had him on the ropes on a 6 6 7 board. We were essentially all in, him holding A7 and me 88. This heads up was going to end after just two matches, I was feeling great obviously. This all changed when Sammy spiked the Ace on the river and won the 2nd match.

Match #3

I was unhappy with the result of match 2, but very happy with how I had played in the first two matches. I felt in control and had a pretty good idea of where Sammy was in most hands. Sammy came out in match 3 with a blend of his first two matches with big pre-flop raises and open limps mixed in. Match 3 started out horribly for me, flopping pretty good heads up with KT on a T36 board. Sammy had been playing top pair pretty aggressively and I felt pretty safe when he check raised my flop bet. I almost re-poped but didn't see many advantages in doing so in this match. An A hit on the turn and Sammy checked. The turn doesn't change anything in the hand (or shouldn't) so I felt comfortable making a pretty large bet. Sammy responded by shoving in. I have no idea what he had, but don't think he is ever bluffing me here. He either flopped two pair or a set I felt, so I folded. Will be curious to see what he had on TV. I battled back to closer to even when the hand of the match developed. I raised with J2 and the flop came JT2 with two hearts. I was opening every button at this point and Sammy was checking every flop dark. This flop was gin until I was raised by Sammy. Sammy's range here is pretty wide with this wet of a board, unfortunately for me he held the exact hand I had beaten 8 years earlier TJ. I had caught a cooler and was 2 outs away from being beaten by Sammy in the rematch. All the confidence I had felt throughout the match was gone. I felt great and real felt in control of all 3 matches, however it was all irrelevant as I was basically dead. And then it happened, the nice 2 on the river to double me up and cripple Sammy. After that it wasn't long till we got it all in, Sammy reraised all-in for about 16 big blinds. I had a borderline hand, but felt like I could be ahead with K J often enough to warrant a call. Luckily for me I had Sammy dominated with his K 10 and I was able to hold and take the 3rd match and claim victory.

Summary

Sammy played very different that what I had ever imagined. One of the goals heads up is to keep your opponent guessing and constantly react to your opponent. I think Sammy did this very well. He played two very different styles throughout the three matches and deserves a ton of credit and had me on the ropes for sure.

Sammy played well ,and at the same time I am very happy with the way I played in the match.

Follow Chris on Twitter @CMONEYMAKER

He's sick. He's exhausted. He's on the verge of doing something he's never done before.

Until last night, George Lind III had never made a World Series of Poker final table. It seemed inconceivable to those who know him and his record. He's been a poker pro for ten years. For a long time, he was a king of PokerStars Supernova Elites. He's made final tables in the World Championship of Online Poker and Spring Championship of Online Poker. In all that time, however, he's never placed better than 10th at a WSOP event. That changed last night when Lind hit the final table of the WSOP $10,000 Omaha/8 Championship in Las Vegas. What's more, he did it while battling the casino crud.

"I swear there's something in the air here in Vegas that doesn't agree with me because every year I come here I get sick in the first week or two," he wrote on his blog. "I rarely ever get sick anywhere else."

When Lind wakes up in Las Vegas today, he will have to defeat only two players two win his first WSOP bracelet. With three players remaining, Lind has about half the chips in play. If he can dispatch with Steve Billirakis and Viacheslav Zhukov, he'll have the gold on his wrist before he goes to sleep again. A win would bank him nearly half a million bucks. For his sake, we're hoping he wakes up feeling better than he did when he went to bed.

Not to be outdone, Friend of PokerStars Bill Chen has a shot at a bracelet today, too. When he comes back to the $1,500 Triple Chance No-Limit Hold'em event today, he'll be fourth in chips with ten players remaining.

Chen, as you're probably aware, is no stranger to WSOP final tables. Back in 2006, he won two bracelets in the same year. He's been one of our PokerStars buddies ever since. If Chen manages a win today, it will be worth more than $350,000 and his third WSOP bracelet.

Good luck guys!

Update: Lind finished runner-up in his event. Chen ended up finishing in fourth place. Congrats on the great showings, gentlemen.

Photo courtesy WSOP.com

There are few things in life Eugene Katchalov doesn't have. He snagged a $2.5 million World Poker Tour title during its 2007 glory days. He picked up a PokerStars WCOOP bracelet in 2009. Just this year, he crushed the $100,000 Super High Roller at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. He lacked just one important thing:

A World Series of Poker bracelet.

For a long time, folks have talked about Katchalov's "rushes." With more than $6 million in career earnings (keep in mind, he's just 30 years old), there are periods of time when it seems the guy does nothing but win. There comes a point, however, at which a rush becomes consistency. It seems we've reach that point.

Late last night, Katchalov won his first WSOP bracelet after taking down the 2011 $1,500 7-card stud event. To do it, he had to outlast more than 350 players and come back from a 5-1 chip deficit heads-up. For his effort, he banked another $122,000.

Congrats, Eugene, on keeping the rush (or whatever we're going to call it) going. Next time give us a heads up that you plan to win something so we can be there.

Previous 2011 WSOP coverage:

Humberto Brenes turned 60 years old last month. If you forgot to buy him a gift, you might consider making up for it by congratulating him on another milestone. Last night, the Team PokerStars Pro from Costa Rica notched his 60th World Series of Poker cash.

Brenes outlasted more than 900 other players in the largest limit Omaha/8 field in WSOP history. Though he couldn't pick up his third WSOP bracelet, he did manage a sixth place finish for $42,857.

It's been nearly 25 years since Brenes first cashed at the WSOP. It happened back in 1987 when he took 14th in the Main Event for a jaw-dropping $12,500. Since then, Brenes has won more than $2 million in WSOP purses (nearly half of his career live tournament earnings).

With 60 cashes under his belt, Brenes is sixth in all-time WSOP in-the-money finishes. Only Erik Seidel (61), Berry Johnston (61), Chris Ferguson (63), Men Nguyen (71), and Phil Hellmuth (79) are ahead of Costa Rica's godfather of poker.

So, congratulations to Humberto Brenes for crossing the milestone (and turning 60 a few weeks ago). We suspect he's got a few more years and cashes in his future.

Photo courtesy WSOP.com

Jonathan Duhamel had faced countless opponents in his long march to the World Series of Poker Final table and the heads-up battle that would decide the 2010 world champion, but none so insistent and unforgiving as the expectation he foisted upon himself. He said at every turn that he would not be happy unless he was wearing the gold bracelet. Tonight, Duhamel put a muzzle on that nagging compulsion when he became the first Canadian to win the World Series of Poker Main Event. After entering the second night of November Nine play with a better than 6-1 chip lead over American John Racener, Duhamel made quick work of his opponent and claimed the bracelet in fewer than 50 hands.

"It's a dream come true right now," Duhamel said.

The 23-year-old PokerStars player from Quebec may have have pushed himself unfairly hard, but it was not without some help in the pushing. Duhamel's victory makes him a nationwide hero, the first man from Canada to ever win poker's biggest championship. For the past decade, Canada's first father of poker, Daniel Negreanu, was the undisputed king of Canadian card playing, but even he was never able to claim a Main Event victory. In an age of poker that welcomes players from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, there is still only one person from each country who can be the nation's first WSOP champion, and Canada was not going to let Duhamel forget it.

The newspapers--which often have a hard time grasping the vagaries of the game--couldn't hold back. In one breath, they mentioned Duhamel's status as a "college dropout." In the next, they waved the Canadian flag as hard as possible above Duhamel's head. "Quebecer holds all aces in $8.9M World Series of Poker" offered today's Montreal Gazette. "Canadian on the verge of poker history--and $9 million" read the Toronto Star."Montrealer could become the first Canadian to win World Series of Poker" screamed the Winnipeg Free Press. The implication was clear: Duhamel may have won the bracelet and the money, but this is as much his country's victory as it is his.

Duhamel did not shy from the national pride. Like sports fans the country over, Duhamel knew what his accomplishment would mean the people under the maple leaf flag. Duhamel dressed his family and friends in Montreal Canadiens sweaters and took any opportunity to talk nicely about his suburb on the outskirts of Montreal. Boucherville, a city of around 40,000 on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, is a place with neighborhoods named "Harmonie" and a city just small enough that Duhamel will be the biggest name there for the foreseeable future.

"I have a chance to put my beautiful city of Boucherville onto the map, and I'll do everything I can to do it," Duhamel said. "I've lived there all my life. I would never trade that for anything."

There will be those who look at how Duhamel started the final table and make the logical jump that the Canadian's road to victory this weekend was a smooth one. That is, if Duhamel had a big chip lead to begin the final table and a massive chip lead heads-up, he had no excuse to not win. Those would be people who didn't witness Duhamel's precipitous fall down the leaderboard Saturday when his ace-king lost to John Racener's ace-queen, a pot that paved Racener's road to heads-up competition. It, too, threatened to end Duhamel's and Canada's chance for the bracelet. Duhamel, as he did all summer, persevered and dispatched the remaining favorites from the table. The effort carried him to the stage tonight where poker's biggest spotlight pointed its bulb in the Canadian's eyes and asked, "What's your next trick?"

Duhamel responded by summarily dismissing Racener. After wading through a field of more than 7,300 players, waiting four months to play at the final table, and killing 40 hours before getting to face Racener heads-up, Duhamel made it clear, he didn't want to drag this out any more than necessary. After doubling up Racener once in the first 30 hands with king-four versus pocket queens, Duhamel didn't seem fazed. After a short break in the action, Duhamel came back in binary form. It was a yes/no proposition for him. He was either all-in or folding. It took just a few hands of that before Racener's stack was only a little more than 15,000,000. With the big blind coming in at 1.6 million, Racener had little time to wait.

And so when Duhamel shoved it in again, Racener finally decided to call. It was [As][jh] for Duhamel and [kd][8d] for Racener. With his hood off, Duhamel rocked back and forth on his feet and breathed deeply as he watched the flop come out [4c][4d][9s]. It was a clean flop, one just as pretty as the [6c] on the turn.

Duhamel put his hands together as as if in prayer and held them to his mouth. The man who had betrayed no emotion in the hours leading up to this moment suddenly allowed himself to look hopeful. He had to dodge just six cards in the deck. If he could, everything he wanted would be his. Only an eight or a king would ruin the moment.

The dealer's hand pulled out the last card that would matter in the 2010 World Series of Poker. It was the [5c], a greeting card that might have read, "You are now the biggest name in poker."

With four months of energy stored in his 23-year-old body, Duhamel turned from the table and sprinted to his fans. In a sea of red jerseys, it looked for a moment as if Duhamel and his fans had won the Stanley Cup. Hoisted onto shoulders, Duhamel rode a screaming scrum around the stage and into poker history.

With that, with his family and friends bursting from their Canadiens sweaters, with the poker world ready to celebrate him, Jonathan Duhamel climbed down from shoulder-top, hugged Racener, and then assumed his role as poker champion of the world.

From that spot on the stage, Duhamel could see his fans' elation, Racener's disappointment, and the local cadre of the world poker media mobilizing to make him the biggest name in the game. What he could only imagine is what will happen next. The WSOP will cut Duhamel a $8.9 million dollar check. His home country will celebrate him. The late night TV chat shows will start calling. The possibilities are so heady, it will be some time before Duhamel will be able to grasp it all.

"It's like the most beautiful thing in my life by far," he said. "This bracelet means so much to me. It's amazing. It's unbelievable."

Tonight, Jonathan Duhamel is everything he wanted to be. He is the man with a bracelet. He is a hero to his country and beloved Boucherville. He is the 2010 World Series of Poker champion.

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For a look back at all our November Nine coverage see any of the links below.