Daniel Buckley Has 13 WSOP Final Tables and Zero Bracelets. He Leads Event #45.

Daniel Buckley has made 13 WSOP final tables across a career worth more than $1 million in tournament earnings, and he has zero bracelets to show for any of it.

That changes or it doesn't over the next day at Horseshoe Las Vegas. Buckley bagged 544,000 chips at the end of Day 2 in Event #45, the $2,500 Mixed Omaha Hi-Lo 8/Seven Card Stud Hi-Lo 8, good for second in chips among 26 survivors. The only player with more is Joseph Melancon, who stacked 770,000 — but Melancon has no recorded WSOP final-table history. Buckley has thirteen.

Thirteen times he's sat down at a short table with a bracelet on the line. Thirteen times he's walked away without one.

Thirteen times he's sat down at a short table with a bracelet on the line — thirteen times he's walked away without one.

The Format Nobody Talks About

Event #45 is a split-format event alternating between Omaha Hi-Lo 8-or-Better and Seven Card Stud Hi-Lo 8-or-Better. It's the kind of event that empties the rail. No hold'em. No PLO splashy all-ins. Just two old-school split-pot games that reward patience, hand-reading in both directions, and the ability to scoop when everyone else is chopping.

The $2,500 buy-in filters out casual mixed-game dabblers. The players still standing on Day 2 tend to be specialists — the kind who grind the $80/$160 mixed games at Bellagio during the summer and treat the Series as their annual title shot.

Buckley fits that profile precisely. His $1,042,229 in lifetime WSOP earnings didn't come from one deep main-event run. It came from 13 final tables spread across the kind of events most poker fans skip past on the schedule. Mixed games. Limit formats. The tournaments where the buy-in-to-coverage ratio is the worst in the building.

The Field at His Back

The chip leader entering Day 3 is Melancon at 770,000 — a 41% edge over Buckley's stack. But Melancon is a relative unknown with no publicly recorded WSOP final tables or lifetime earnings. In a format this specialized, experience in split-pot endgame spots matters enormously. Scooping a pot in Stud Hi-Lo with five players left requires different muscles than shipping a hold'em tournament, and Buckley has been in that chair 13 times before.

Jun Weng sits third at 510,000. Weng, from China, has $69,709 in career earnings and one prior WSOP final table — a fraction of Buckley's résumé, but enough to suggest this isn't a tourist run.

The bubble is close. With 26 remaining, the field is compressing fast. Two notable eliminations already landed on Day 2: Yunlamkevin Choi, a British pro with $336,375 in career earnings and three WSOP final tables, busted in 28th. Daniel Thomas Walmsley of New Zealand also fell, finishing 27th.

What Makes This Different

Buckley's situation isn't just a chip-leader story. It's a referendum on how the WSOP remembers its mixed-game players.

Thirteen final tables is an extraordinary number. For context, there are bracelet winners with fewer than five. Buckley has built one of the most consistent résumés in WSOP mixed-game history without the one result that would canonize it.

The format helps him. Omaha Hi-Lo and Stud Hi-Lo reward the exact skills a 13-time finalist has been sharpening for years: reading low draws, calculating scoop equity, staying patient through limit betting rounds where one mistake costs you three bets, not your tournament life.

But the format also punishes variance slowly. In limit split-pot events, chip leads erode. There are no shove-fold dynamics to exploit. You grind, you read, you scoop — or you don't.

Buckley has 544,000 chips, 26 opponents, and a 14th shot at a final table that could finally end with gold hardware on his wrist. The last 13 didn't. This one might.