Brian Tate Is Chasing the Rarest Gold in Poker

The WSOP has awarded exactly 11 Badugi bracelets in its entire history — and Brian Tate, a player with $529K in lifetime earnings and zero of them, just took the chip lead at the final table of the 12th.

That number deserves a beat. Eleven. There are more bracelet events in a single week of the summer series than the total number of Badugi bracelets ever awarded. You can win a NLHE bracelet and join a club of thousands. Win a Badugi bracelet and you share a room with roughly a dozen humans.

You can win a NLHE bracelet and join a club of thousands — win a Badugi bracelet and you share a room with roughly a dozen humans.

The Field

Tate sits at 428,000 chips. He's got seven career final tables and more than half a million in lifetime cashes, but the bracelet column reads zero. Behind him: Lok Chan (348,000, one bracelet, $630K lifetime), Satoshi Tanaka (329,000, one bracelet, $310K lifetime), Kevin Xu (307,000, zero bracelets, one WSOPC ring), and Ryan Hoenig (297,000, one bracelet, over $1M lifetime).

Three of the five players at this final table already own a bracelet. Tate doesn't. That's the story.

Why This Matters More Than a $1,500 Buy-In Suggests

You could argue this is just another low-buy-in mixed-game event, that the field is small, that nobody's watching Badugi on PokerGO at 2 a.m. Fine. But rarity doesn't care about production budgets.

The entire Badugi bracelet population fits in a minivan. Winning one puts you in a historical category that no amount of NLHE grinding can replicate — not because the game is harder, but because the WSOP almost never spreads it. That scarcity is the point.

Tate's 428,000 chips are a lead, not a lock. Hoenig alone has over a million in career earnings and a bracelet already. Chan has one too. The table is stacked with players who've been here before and closed.

But Tate is the one sitting on chips right now, in a game the WSOP barely offers, chasing a piece of gold that fewer people own than have walked on the moon.

I'm watching.