Team Lang's Cannibalization Problem at the Stud Final Table

Team Lang drafted nine players for the 2026 WSOP. As of June 7, two of them are sitting at the same eight-handed final table, and one has to bust before the other can climb.

Jeremy Ausmus and Allen Kessler both reached the final eight of Event #23, the $10,000 Seven Card Stud Championship. For the rest of the field, that's a clean sweat. For Team Lang (Mike + Josh), it's a math problem with no good answer.

For Team Lang, every rung Ausmus climbs is a rung Kessler falls, and the points don't cancel out cleanly.

The Collision

In a nine-player fantasy roster, having two names at the same final table sounds like a dream. It isn't. Fantasy scoring rewards placement. When both of your players are competing for the same finishing positions, every spot one gains is a spot the other loses. The net effect on your team's total is muted compared to having those two players deep-running in separate events.

Team Lang locked Ausmus (signal 31 of their locked roster entries) and Kessler (signal 32) into position before the final table formed. There's no roster move to make here. You just sit, watch, and do the arithmetic.

The strategic question for anyone following the 25kfantasy.com leaderboard: which outcome is better for Team Lang? If Ausmus finishes second and Kessler eighth, the team nets a big placement score from Ausmus but gets the minimum from Kessler. Flip the finishes and the math reverses. The nightmare is a 4th/5th split, where neither player reaches the top-heavy scoring tiers and both block each other from climbing further.

The Table They're Up Against

This isn't a soft final table. The chip leader is Qibang Cheung, a relatively unknown player from Great Britain with $142K in lifetime earnings and his first career WSOP final table, sitting on 1,880,000 in chips. But the danger is everywhere around him.

Naoya Kihara, a one-time bracelet winner from Japan with $1.93M in lifetime cashes and eight career final tables, is right behind Cheung at 1,880,000. Ryan Miller, a two-time bracelet winner with $1.35M in earnings, holds 1,130,000. And then there's Michael Mizrachi. The Grinder has eight bracelets, $23.18M in lifetime earnings, and 32 career final tables. He's short at 390,000, but nobody at the table wants to be the person who doubles him.

The Ausmus and Kessler chip counts weren't listed in the top stacks, which means both players are likely in the lower half of the eight remaining. That compounds the problem for Team Lang: both of their horses are in the danger zone, and they could easily bust in consecutive hands, yielding minimal placement points from either.

What It Means for the Contest

Same-team final-table collisions are rare enough that most 25kFantasy managers never have to think about them. But they expose a real flaw in roster construction: player correlation. If you draft two stud specialists, you're implicitly accepting that they'll compete for the same limited number of stud events on the schedule. The deeper they both run, the more their value cannibalizes.

For Team Lang, the optimal outcome is stark. You want one player to bust in eighth so the other is free to run up to a top-three finish unobstructed. Rooting against your own draft pick is an ugly feeling, but the math doesn't reward sentimentality.

The $10K Stud Championship final table plays down on June 7 at Horseshoe/Paris in Las Vegas. By the time the last card is dealt, Team Lang will have learned something most fantasy managers only theorize about: what happens when your roster eats itself.