Event #2's Final Table Is a Fantasy Ghost Town

Five of the six players returning for the WSOP Event #2 final table aren't on a single fantasy roster in the 25kFantasy contest — and the $5,000 buy-in was supposed to be where the rostered pros separated themselves.

The $5K 8-Handed No-Limit Hold'em was a premium event. High buy-in, small field relative to the $400–$600 cattle calls, and exactly the kind of tournament where fantasy managers expected their drafted pros to convert. Instead, the final table is almost entirely unrostered.

Nicholas Seward is the lone fantasy-relevant player still alive, sitting on one of 58 locked rosters as a pick for Stake Kings (Ryan Stiner's squad). That's it. One player. One team sweating.

Nicholas Seward is the lone fantasy-relevant player still alive, sitting on one of 58 locked rosters as a pick for Stake Kings.

The Chip Leader Nobody Drafted

Anatoly Nikitin leads Event #2 with 3,250,000 chips. He has zero bracelets, zero rings, and $493,305 in lifetime tournament earnings across just two career final tables. Behind him sits Ivan Ruban at 2,300,000 — also zero bracelets, zero rings, but a more substantial $1,008,861 in lifetime cashes and five prior final tables. Neither appears on any 25kFantasy roster.

Rounding out the table: Xiaohu Liu (1,910,000 chips, $309,388 lifetime), Zexiang Sun (1,700,000, $17,586 lifetime), and Charles Alex-Barton (1,690,000, $239,396 lifetime). Zero bracelets among all five un-rostered finalists. Zero rings. Combined lifetime earnings of roughly $2.07 million — less than some single rostered pros have earned in a calendar year.

Seward, the only name that moves a fantasy scoreboard, sits with four remaining players and a chip stack that trails the leader by over 1.5 million.

What This Means for Your Roster

This is the structural problem with fantasy poker in a nutshell: premium events don't guarantee premium final tables.

Managers built rosters around the assumption that $5K events filter out the recreational field. They do — partly. But they don't filter in rostered names at any predictable rate. The result is a final table where 58 locked rosters have exactly one sweat, and every other team in the contest gets nothing from Event #2.

If you're on Stake Kings, Seward converting a deep run into a bracelet is a massive potential score against a field where almost nobody else benefits. That's the upside of thin coverage — when your guy is the only guy, a win creates enormous separation on the 25kfantasy.com leaderboard.

But it also works in reverse. If Seward busts sixth, Event #2 was a complete zero for the fantasy contest. A $5,000 bracelet event — gone, with no fantasy impact whatsoever.

The Bigger Pattern

We're still early in the 2026 WSOP, and Event #2 is already illustrating a dynamic that will repeat all summer: the gap between who managers think will final-table premium events and who actually does.

Nikitin and Ruban aren't unknown — Ruban has crossed a million in lifetime earnings — but neither was a consensus fantasy pick. Sun has $17,586 in career tournament cashes. These are the players who show up at final tables when variance does its thing.

For fantasy purposes, the takeaway is simple. Don't overweight your roster toward $5K-and-up events unless you're comfortable with the reality that most of those final tables will look like this one: five strangers and one lonely sweat.