Five Cards, Two Tables, One Monster Chip Lead in WSOP Big O

Five cards, a hi-lo split, and a pot-limit betting structure: if you've never sweated a Big O hand at two tables left, this is the one.

WSOP Event #22, the $1,500 Big O (Five Card PLO Hi-Lo 8 or Better), is down to 18 players. And the chip leader is Christopher Alcindor, a Canadian two-time WSOPC ring winner with $309,966 in lifetime earnings and 14 career final tables, sitting on 2,700,000 chips.

Christopher Alcindor, a two-time WSOPC ring winner with 14 career final tables, leads 18 remaining players at 2,700,000 chips.

Why Big O Hands Hit Different

In No-Limit Hold'em, you hold two cards and the decision tree is narrow enough to talk through in a few sentences. Big O blows that open. Five hole cards. Pot-limit betting. A qualifying low that splits the pot when it arrives. Every street multiplies the number of live combinations, and the best players aren't just reading one hand from their opponents. They're reading two: the high and the low.

At the two-table stage of a bracelet event, that complexity compounds. You can't simply shove and pray. Pot-limit caps your aggression. And scooping both halves of a split pot is worth roughly twice as much as chopping, which means the real edges come from hand selection and board texture reads that most Hold'em players never have to make.

The Stack Landscape

Behind Alcindor, the field is bunched. Kevin Kendrick holds 2,060,000. Ukraine's Stanislav Halatenko, who carries $917,481 in lifetime earnings, a WSOPC ring, and four career final tables, sits at 1,600,000. James Roullier has 1,320,000, and Volodymyr Kondratenko, another two-time ring winner with five career final tables, is at 1,220,000.

That's a top-heavy but not runaway structure. Alcindor's lead is real (roughly 1.3x second place), but no one at two tables is in pure survival mode yet. The pot-limit format keeps the stacks deep relative to the blinds, which means more postflop poker, more multi-street decisions, and more spots where a five-card hand with coordinated high and low draws can outmaneuver a one-dimensional holding.

The Format Deserves the Spotlight

Big O is the most decision-dense format on the WSOP schedule. Five cards, mandatory two-card usage, hi-lo split, pot-limit. Every river decision at this stage involves calculating whether you're scooping, quartering, or getting freerolled by a better low. It's the kind of poker that rewards the players who've logged serious mixed-game hours, and Alcindor's 14 final tables suggest he's put in the reps.

With 18 left and the bracelet in sight, the next few levels will compress these stacks fast. In Big O, the pots that matter most are the ones where someone scoops. When Alcindor or Halatenko find a spot to bet pot on the river with the nut high and a backdoor low lock, that's the hand worth breaking down.