Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers Don't

Facts and figures. They make the world go around and, more often than not, tell a story without letting opinions or biases get in the way. Which numbers from past week tell that story and what quick opinions do we have?

$1,001,110 – The year’s biggest World Poker Tour event concluded this weekend with Daniel Strelitz in the winner’s circle, as he kept the L.A. Poker Classic Main Event title in his home state of California. Strelitz outlasted a stacked 521 player field, to record his first career seven-figure score. The win was also Strelitz’s first breakthrough result, after final tabling two World Series of Poker events this summer and a $25,000 High Roller event last year at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open.

500 – Don’t look now but Mike Sexton might be going from World Poker Tour commentator, to World Poker Tour champion, to World Poker Tour Player of the Year. Sexton finished 4^th in the LAPC Main Event and now, heading towards the back end of Season XV, is 500 POY points behind Benjamin Zamani. If Sexton can record a few more scores and win Player of the Year, it would be, hot take alert, the coolest thing to ever happen in the history of poker.

22 – With Poker Central covering ARIA High Rollers, there are a few story lines that we will be following over the next few ARIA series. One of them will be how players that will be participating in this summer’s Super High Roller Bowl fair in those big buy-in events but another will be the ARIA Career Cashes list. After recording a 4^th place finish in the $50K Super High Roller event this weekend, Cary Katz is tied for the top spot on that list with Poker Central Ambassador Tom Marchese.

54 – After the LAPC Main Event, the second stop of the WPT California Swing is the Bay 101 Shooting Star Main Event. The $7,500 buy-in event is one of two WPT events on the schedule that boast a bounty feature. 54 “Shooting Stars” each have a $2,500 price tag tied to their elimination and some of this year’s bounties include Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Super Bowl champion Richard Seymour, three-time WPT champion Anthony Zinno and last year’s WSOP Main Event champion Qui Nguyen.

$2,600,000 – While the PokerStars Championship Panama series is starting this weekend, PokerStars just announced another series set to kick off in May. PokerStars will return to Russia with the Championship Sochi series with a $2,600,000 guaranteed Main Event. The series is expected to be one of the biggest PokerStars Championships of the year and should be a solid warm-up for European players before the World Series of Poker.