Kevin Kendrick Has No Resume and All the Chips in the $1,500 Big O

The Ghost at the Top of the Counts

Kevin Kendrick has no bracelets, no rings, and no recorded lifetime earnings. At 10 PM at the Horseshoe on June 8, he has more chips than almost anyone left in WSOP Event #22, the $1,500 Big O (Five Card PLO Hi-Lo 8 or Better).

Kendrick sits on 2.06 million chips with 18 players remaining. Search his name in any tournament database and you'll find nothing. No final-table history. No circuit results. No Twitter handle to check for bad beats. He's a blank page at the front of one of the most skill-intensive niche formats on the summer schedule.

Search his name in any tournament database and you'll find nothing.

The One Name Ahead of Him

Kendrick isn't technically the chip leader. That distinction belongs to Christopher Alcindor, a Canadian with 2.7 million chips, two WSOPC rings, 14 career final tables, and $309,966 in lifetime tournament earnings. Alcindor is the closest thing this final two tables has to a credentialed frontrunner. In a field full of unknowns, his résumé at least fills a paragraph.

Behind them, the stacks tell their own story. Ukraine's Stanislav Halatenko holds 1.6 million and brings the deepest bankroll at the tables: $917,481 in lifetime cashes, one WSOPC ring, and four prior final tables. James Roullier, another American with no recorded results, sits at 1.32 million. Volodymyr Kondratenko rounds out the top five with 1.22 million, two Circuit rings, and $65,872 in lifetime earnings.

Not one of the 18 remaining players owns a WSOP bracelet.

Why Big O Makes This Interesting

Big O is Five Card PLO Hi-Lo 8 or Better. It's a split-pot game dealt with five hole cards instead of four, which means more draws, more scooping opportunities, and more spots where a player who understands the low-qualifying dynamics can grind edges that pure hold'em players miss entirely.

The format draws a specific crowd. Big O specialists tend to come from the mixed-game cash ecosystem, not the tournament circuit. That's one reason the leaderboard looks the way it does: the players who study this game hardest often have thin tournament records, because they spend their hours in $20/$40 and $50/$100 mix games at the Bellagio or Commerce rather than firing $1,500 freezeouts.

Kendrick's empty database profile doesn't mean he's a recreational player stumbling into a heater. It might mean the opposite. Cash-game grinders who finally take a shot at a bracelet event in their best format often look exactly like this on paper: invisible until they're not.

What the Stacks Say

With 18 players left, two tables are still in play. Alcindor's 2.7 million leads, Kendrick's 2.06 million trails by roughly 640,000, and everyone else sits at 1.6 million or below. The gap between second and third is larger than the gap between first and second. If Alcindor and Kendrick both navigate the next few levels, they could arrive at the final table with a combined stack advantage that reshapes every ICM calculation for the remaining field.

But Big O punishes overconfidence. The five-card starting hands produce enormous equity swings post-flop, and the hi-lo split means a scoop pot can double a short stack in a single hand. No lead is safe in this format, and 18-to-9 is where the strangest runouts tend to cluster.

Alcindor has the chips. Halatenko has the résumé. Kendrick has neither credential and both at once: the stack to bully and the anonymity to operate without anyone adjusting to his tendencies.

The $1,500 Big O bracelet is still open. The man closest to claiming it is someone nobody saw coming.