LAS VEGAS — During the three weeks between the setting of the World Series of Poker Main Event final table and Monday night’s resumption at
Horseshoe Las Vegas, Lucas Jumalon opened his phone and sent a direct message to Joe Cada.
The 22-year-old from Spokane, Washington, was holding the biggest
chip lead anybody has carried into a World Series of Poker Main Event final table this century. Cada is the youngest man ever to win it, a record he’s held since 2009. Jumalon wanted some advice, and Cada was happy to respond.
“I was amazed at how mature he is, much more than I was at that age,” Cada told me by phone Monday afternoon from his home in Michigan, a few hours before cards went
in the air on the Strip. “And I thought I was mature at the time, which I definitely wasn’t.”
Cada, at 21, went at it with considerably less humility.
In October of 2009, days before he became the youngest Main Event champion in history, he
told me a story about running into Peter Eastgate that summer. Eastgate had won the Main Event the previous year at 22, taking the youngest-champion record off Phil Hellmuth, who’d held it for 19 years.
Cada walked up to him and told him, to his face, that he was taking it next.
“He just laughed and said, ‘Yeah, you probably will,’” Cada told me at the time. “I hope he’s right.”
He was right. Eight days before his 22nd birthday,
Cada sat down heads-up against Darvin Moon at the Penn & Teller Theater and walked away with the $8.5 million and Main Event bracelet.
Seventeen years later, Jumalon sat down at his own final table, and Monday night was not a coronation. It was six hours of survival, and only two players went out.
Evagoras Evagorou, the 48-year-old optician from Cyprus who came in as the
short stack, went out ninth. Mario Boos, France’s best hope at a first Main Event champion, followed him in eighth. Then the table dug in, and play was halted at Horseshoe Events Center with seven players still alive, one more than the broadcast had planned for.
Jumalon still leads, but the night belonged to somebody else.
Han Feng, who started eighth of nine with 17 big blinds and had gone eight days and 9,208 players without ever being
all-in and at risk, doubled through Boos, then closed the night by winning a big pot with
pocket queens against Lauri Saaskilahti. He bagged 106.5 million and second place. Saaskilahti, the Finn who had never cashed at the WSOP before this summer, went from seventh in chips to third with 84.5 million. Rami Hammoud is at 45.5 million. Michael Gagliano and Jamie Shaevel are both under 20 big blinds, and Greg Mueller, the 55-year-old former hockey player the room has been pulling for, comes back Tuesday as the short stack with 11.
Wearing a black
Scarface t-shirt and backwards Yankees baseball cap, Jumalon bagged 212 million, twice what Feng has. Everyone left is guaranteed $1.5 million with the winner taking home $10 million.
“We just dodged the landmines,” Jumalon said told ESPN. “I think I did a pretty good job today bobbing and weaving. We lost a couple of medium pots and hung in there and stemmed the tide a little bit. It was a good day.”
Hours earlier, on the phone from Michigan, Cada used a similar boxing analogy when describing Jumalon’s ride to the final table.
“Leading up to that final table, I think he played exactly how you’re supposed to play,” Cada said. “He really picked his spots. He amped up his aggression, and when he felt pushback, he didn’t get carried away with it.
“He didn’t try to win every single hand he was involved in. It was kind of like jab, jab, jab, and he kept building that chip lead. I think he was a masterclass going into that final table.”
Cada and Jumalon arrived at the final table in very different ways. Cada dropped out of community college at 19 to play poker full time, over his mother’s objections, with $300,000 already in the bank. Jumalon graduated from Grand Canyon University this spring with a business degree and a minor in analytics.
After Jumalon reached out for advice, here’s what Cada told him.
“My advice to him was just focus on poker. Focus on your game. Review your hands. Stay involved,” Cada said. “And worry about the stuff outside of poker after it’s all said and done.”
Jumalon also asked about life away from the table, which is a fair question to put to a man who won $8.5 million at 21 and had to figure out the rest on his own. Cada told him it could wait.
“I would love to give the advice away from the table. I really want to,” Cada said. “I told him, just reach out to me after it’s all said and done.”
Cada came into the 2009 final table fifth in chips with 13,215,000 of the 193,465,000 on the table, and at one point on that first night he was down to about 2 million. He won the Main Event from the bottom. But he has watched what a
monster stack does to the man holding it, and he was clear about how he thinks it should be played.
Joe Cada is all smiles after winning the 2009 WSOP Main Event.
“You should be on the more
aggressive side,” Cada said. “But at the same time, it’s that thin line where you want to be really aggressive, but you don’t want to cross that line.”
In 2018, Cada, who has over $15 million in career earnings, did the thing former champions almost never do. He made a second Main Event final table nine years after his first, finishing fifth out of 7,874 players, and became just the second man in the history of the tournament to win it and return, after Dan Harrington.
His bid for a second Main Event title went down the shoot when his pocket 10s ran into Tony Miles’ ace-king, a king came in the window, and Cada went out fifth for $2.15 million.
Cada never held a lead like Jumalon’s at either final table. But in 2009, he took a better than 2-to-1 chip lead into
heads-up play against Moon: 136,925,000 to 58,875,000. I was in the theater that night when he gave it back. You could feel air being sucked out of Cada’s
rail.
“That was actually one of those times I really felt the pressure at the table,” Cada said. “I was primarily a heads-up player and a shorthanded player. I had probably over a million hands played online, and I was playing someone that had never played heads-up before.”
Didn’t matter. Moon, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 56, dragged him into big pots he didn’t want to play.
“He made the style of the game really big-pot poker, where he wasn’t going to play any small hands,” Cada said. “And every hand I lost was very consequential. I was trying to avoid those big marginal spots, and he just kept putting me in those spots. Once he took over the chip lead, I just said to myself I can’t just keep playing this. He was outplaying me.”
So Cada stopped avoiding them. The hand that turned it back was a call, for a huge portion of his stack, with a
middle pair, on nothing more than the sense that the story Moon was telling didn’t add up.
“If it doesn’t make sense, I’ve just got to go with my gut and what I’m feeling,” he said. “And sure enough, he was bluffing.”
There is a lesson here for Jumalon, who woke up Tuesday morning in Las Vegas with the chip lead and six people left to beat. Jumalon added 18 million chips in six hours and described his own night as dodging.
Jumalon has roughly 18 hours between the end of Monday’s session and Tuesday’s resumption. Cada’s advice for that stretch has nothing to do with tomorrow.
“Try to ignore anticipation of what will happen and what’s going to happen,” he said, “and more look at what has happened. What did you see in that first day of poker? How did people play? Did anything surprise you? Did everything go according to plan? What did my opponents think of my play? How do they perceive me?”
He kept going, and this is where you could hear the coach in him.
“This guy may think I’m always bluffing, so do I really want to
bluff this guy in a big spot if he doesn’t believe me? Or this guy may think I probably won’t put in a big bluff without a really good hand, so when a big bluff does come around, is this the right guy to bluff?”
And one more thing, which Cada said he passed along directly.
“Ignore what the public says. A lot of people are going to be jealous, there’s going to be a lot of haters, and everyone can see all the
hole cards, so everybody’s going to be the perfect poker player watching it on TV.”
Even if Jumalon prevails on Wednesday night, Cada keeps the record. Cada was 21. Jumalon is 22. I asked Cada whether he takes pride in it.
“That’s a good question. I guess I don’t really take too much pride in it,” he said. “I mean, it’s just a number, an age.”
What he does think about is everything that came before it.
“Looking back at it, it’s hard to believe how early I started and how much money I was making at that age,” said Cada, who coaches boys’ and girls’ soccer at a high school outside Detroit. “I coach high school kids now, and it’s crazy to think that when I was their age I was gambling for hundreds of thousands of dollars online. I bought my first house in cash when I was 18 years old, and before I was 21 I probably made around a million dollars.”
Today, the youngest Main Event world champion in the history of the game is 38 years old and has a four-month-old son at home with his wife, Erica. He played about 15 events at the WSOP this summer, cashed twice, and skipped the Main Event entirely because of the new addition to the family.
Cada will be watching Tuesday night from Michigan, the same as he was Monday. And he's not afraid to admit who he wants to win.
“I’m very much rooting for Lucas,” he said. “I think very highly of him.”
