At the 2014 World Series of Poker

For the ladies championship at the 2014 World Series of Poker, Haixia Zhang became the second female to win the series and she took home the gold bracelet and $153,470. Only playing poker for fun, reports Bluff Magazine, Zhang is a mother of two and her and her husband run a strafing company and have done so for 14 years.

Normally her and her family take a week long trip to Vegas. Before the the trip was never to play poker but Zhang mentioned her husband told her that she should just play. After the last two years of visiting the city but playing in the tournament, Zhang decided to enter for the 2014 WSOP.

Zhang mentioned that she wasn’t nervous during the tournament and she just played her game but there were some tense moments where she was down to four big blinds and that she had lost most of her chips on a hand where she held jacks and another player held eights, hitting the set on the flop. She even text her husband that she thought she would be done very soon after playing with the four big blinds.

For the majority of the day on Saturday, Zhang was in the middle of the pack with chips, the average being 311,000. Mikiyo Aoki held a commanding chip lead at 742,000 when the opening ceremony of the Big One For One Drop. This forced the players to pause until the poet finished his speech. The starting line-up of chip introductions continued after ward and the first official shuffle and deal happened at 1:15 which happened with only seven minutes left in the level 19 kick off.

After it was all said and done Zhang was the one holding the gold bracelet. She mentioned that she is hoping to play a couple more events before she puts in her name to the main event.

Haixia Zhang Wins Women’s Championship was originally published in All things poker on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How he left the grind of Wall Street for the felt of the poker table

Mukul Pahuja once worked on Wall Street but decided to make a career change and follow in his brother Vinny’s footsteps to become a professional poker player. Sitting as the leader in the World Poker Tour Player of the Year race, according to Poker News, Pahuja has recorded more than $2.1 million in live tournament winnings in just three years. Pahjua moved from New York to his new home in Florida and soon after making the move Pahuja got the biggest score of his entire career when he finished third at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open in which he took home $872,625. He wasn’t done there though and three months after that finish he again was in the top three taking the runner-up position at WPT Montreal, nabbing $362,430. He has also started 2014 strong and landed a fourth place finish at WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars as well as eighth place at WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open.

There are many tough players still in contention for the spot of Player of the Year and the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open $10 Million Guarantee was nearly a World Poker Tour sponsored event. There was a WPT Alpha8 held on the property during that tournament and the event hosted a $5 million guarantee at the event. If the $10 million guarantee was a WPT sponsored event, Pahuja would have held the most Player of the Year points in WPT history at 3,350 which would have smashed the current record of 2,575 that Matt Salsberg achieved in Season XI. Pahuja also has been ranking in the 2014 Global Poker Index Player of the Year race after his hot start in 2014 and he’s not complaining. He is content with being a newlywed to his new wife Alexis though and stated, “I’m ecstatic about the life we built for ourselves.”

Mukul Pahuja chooses poker as a career was originally published in All things poker on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.