Phi Long Has Zero Recorded Earnings and 1.4 Million Chips

Phi Long has zero dollars in recorded tournament earnings and 1,405,000 chips at the WSOP's $250 Daily Deepstack — the biggest stack at either of the last two tables.

No bracelets. No rings. No lifetime final tables on file. No Twitter handle. No photo in the WSOP database. When the field in Event #267 crossed below 100 players earlier on June 18, Long already sat on top with 880,000 chips — more than double the next-closest named stack, Mark McGaffin's 480,000. By the time the field ground down to 17, Long had ballooned to 1,405,000.

That's not a slight lead. That's a different zip code.

By the time the field ground down to 17, Long had ballooned to 1,405,000 — and still had zero dollars in recorded lifetime earnings.

The Stack Gap

The two-table snapshot tells the story in raw numbers. Long's 1,405,000 chips at 17 players left means he holds roughly 16–17% of all chips in play in a field that started with hundreds of entries at a $250 buy-in. Among the five named players at the two-table mark, not a single one had a recorded chip count that came close — the WSOP tracker showed zeroes for everyone else's counts at that snapshot, meaning Long's stack was the only one the system flagged as reportable.

The closest thing to a credentialed player at the final two tables is Rhett Vanleeuwen, a U.S. player with $57,831 in lifetime earnings and three career final tables. That's the deepest résumé in Long's neighborhood, and it's still a modest one.

Who's at the Table

The field around Long is almost entirely made up of low-profile or first-time WSOP entries. Tracy Manning, who was third in chips at the 93-player mark with 320,000, has $5,251 in lifetime cashes. Peter Laudenback, another name flagged at 93 remaining, sat on 145,000 with no recorded earnings at all.

This is a $250 daily. The players who grind these events at the Horseshoe during the summer series are often locals, recreational travelers, and satellite winners taking a shot. The buy-in self-selects for a field where a deep run by an unknown isn't unusual — but leading the field by this margin, wire-to-wire from 93 players to 17, is a different proposition entirely.

What We Don't Know

The honest answer to "Who is Phi Long?" is: we don't know yet.

A null lifetime-earnings field in the WSOP database doesn't necessarily mean a player has never cashed — it can mean their results haven't been linked to this player ID, or their history is under a slightly different name, or they've simply never cashed in a tracked event. Long is listed as a U.S. player. Beyond that, the record is blank.

What we do know: from 93 players to 17, Long's stack grew from 880,000 to 1,405,000 — a 60% increase while more than 80% of the remaining field hit the rail. That's accumulation at a pace that suggests something beyond run-good. Whether it's a cash-game regular taking a rare tournament shot, a online grinder's first live summer, or someone nobody has heard of who simply plays well, the chips don't care about your Hendon Mob page.

If Long closes this out, the $250 Daily Deepstack won't rewrite anyone's career earnings leaderboard. But it'll put a name on the board — and right now, that name is Phi Long.