Josh Arieh racks up fifth WSOP bracelet

Although he came back for the fourth day of Event #22: $10,000 Limit Hold'em Championship as the short stack, 2021 WSOP Player of the Year Josh Arieh went on a bit of a run on the final table today to claim his fifth WSOP bracelet. With 134 entries in the field, the total prize pool came to $1,246,200 and Arieh claimed a first-place prize of $316,226.

Arieh defeated Daniel Idema heads-up with the Canadian taking home $195,443 with him while Nozomu Shimizu padded his bankroll with an extra $144,069.

Arieh now has over $8.5 million in WSOP cashes. His biggest cash was finishing in third place in the 2005 Main Event for $2,500,000. An even more spectacular statistic is that his first cash came back in 1999 when he also won his first bracelet in Event #10: $3,000 Limit Hold'em for $202,800.

"Yeah, umm, yeah, I'm trying to think of the best way to say it,” said Arieh to PokerNews. “Like, I know I'm on the outside looking into the Hall of Fame. I look at the list of people and think I'm close. And now, with a little more success, I might get thought of. I mean, Brian Rast, Matt Savage, Isai Scheinberg. I mean, the list just goes on, and only one person gets in a year."

"So, this is just another step that will give me a chance to maybe be inducted in to the Hall of Fame,” said Arieh. “Poker players were looked at as these backroom hustlers. Like, oh, you're a poker player, you're a bad person. You gamble for a living; how do you do that? I've said it before; it just gives it a little validity. And to be thought about, the names of people that are one, it would just be insane.”

From the first hand of the day when Arieh chipped up through Shimizu with a higher kicker, it seemed not much could go wrong for Arieh. He doubled up within the first fifteen minutes through Idema when he had flopped top pair while Idema had turned a lower pair and straight draw. He stayed active, played many hands, and took over the chip lead after only twenty minutes of play.

Shimizu lost a chunk of his stack to Arieh when he called a raise with a flopped pair of jacks to see his opponent had rivered a straight. From there on, the cheerful Japanese player never really recovered and ended up in third place when he lost the remainder of his stack to Idema. Still sporting a huge smile and even giggling a bit, he wished the rest good luck while making his way off the feature stage.

After a short break, the heads-up battle commenced, with the eventual champion holding almost a 2:1 chip lead. The two-hour heads-up battle went back and forth for a bit, but he was slowly chipping away at Idema's stack. Even though the Canadian doubled up once, he kept giving chips back in other pots. Ultimately, he doubled up again before all the chips went in with ace-deuce on a trey-five-five-nine board. Arieh had turned two pair with the nine-four in his hand, and the nine on the river gave him a full house for his fifth bracelet.

"I had this huge rush of clarity and calmness, and I wasn't the least bit stressed out,” said Arieh. “And I just knew that limit hold'em is a game of momentum and a game of rushes. And I was like, well, there are three people left. One of us will go on a rush, and it can very easily be me. And that's just what happened."

Final table results:
Place Player Country Prize
1 Josh Arieh United States $316,226
2 Daniel Idema Canada $195,443
3 Nozomu Shimizu Japan $144,069
4 Joe McKeehen United States $107,540
5 Louis Hillman United States $81,298
6 Nick Pupillo United States $62,255
7 Nick Schulman United States $48,298
8 Kevin Song United States $37,967