The Last Draw: Todd Brunson's Seventeen-Year Wait for a Second Bracelet

At roughly 6 a.m. on June 26, Todd Brunson sat behind 1,580,000 chips in the $10,000 Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw Championship with 15 players left and waited for the next card to come off the deck.

He is 57 years old. He has $2.78 million in lifetime WSOP earnings, 18 career final tables, and exactly one gold bracelet won seventeen years ago. His father, Doyle Brunson, won ten of them across five decades before passing in 2023 at 89. Todd's single bracelet came in the 2005 $2,500 Omaha Hi-Lo event, back when Doyle was still grinding the summer series and the Brunson name carried a gravitational pull that bent entire poker rooms toward it.

Seventeen years between bracelets is a drought by any measure. But Todd Brunson hasn't been missing. He's been showing up to play the games that most of his peers stopped playing a long time ago.

Todd Brunson has $2.78 million in lifetime WSOP earnings, 18 career final tables, and exactly one gold bracelet won seventeen years ago.

The Family Business

To understand what Todd Brunson is doing at a $10,000 Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw table in 2026, you have to understand what the Brunson name means in mixed games.

Doyle Brunson built his legend in No Limit Hold'em. The hand named after him, ten-deuce, came from the 1976 and 1977 Main Event victories. But Doyle was a mixed-game player first. He came up in the road-game era of Texas, where the game changed every orbit and the best player was the one who could beat them all. The Brunson household spoke draw poker, stud, lowball, and Omaha as native languages.

Todd grew up in that household. He did not win a Main Event. He did not become a television star. What he became was one of the most respected draw-game and mixed-game specialists in Las Vegas, a regular in Bobby's Room and the Big Game at Bellagio for decades. His 18 career final tables at the WSOP are concentrated not in the marquee Hold'em events but in the specialist fields: Omaha, Stud, Razz, HORSE, and the various flavors of lowball that the WSOP still scatters through its schedule like artifacts from a previous civilization.

His lone bracelet, from the 2005 $2,500 Omaha Hi-Lo, came in one of those specialist fields. Seventeen years later, the specialist fields have gotten smaller.

A Shrinking Map

The 2026 WSOP schedule still includes the $10,000 Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw Championship, Event #67 of the series. It is, by definition, a championship event: a $10K buy-in, bracelet-eligible, attracting the best lowball players on the planet.

But the field size tells a different story. By the time Day 2 began on the evening of June 25, the tournament was already down to a small, concentrated group. When the field crossed the 27-player milestone that night, the players who remained read like a curated list of mixed-game veterans and high-stakes specialists. When it hit 18 players, the field had condensed to just two tables.

There is no mystery about why. Draw games and mixed games have been losing real estate on the WSOP schedule for years. Hold'em and its variants dominate the modern poker economy. The streamable, solvable, GTO-optimized version of tournament poker lives in No Limit Hold'em. The Triton cameras don't point at Limit 2-7. The training sites don't offer courses on it. The influencers don't clip it.

What remains is a small community of players who love these games and play them at a level that casual entrants can't touch. The $10,000 buy-in functions as its own filter. You don't fire a $10K bullet at a Triple Draw championship on a whim.

The Field at Two Tables

The players who survived to the 15-player mark in Event #67 constitute a cross-section of that community.

Todd Brunson led with 1,580,000 chips. Behind him, Japan's Naoya Kihara held 496,000. Kihara is a three-time bracelet winner with $2.81 million in lifetime earnings and 11 WSOP final tables, a player whose range of games rivals Brunson's own. Mark Roland, a three-time Circuit ring winner with $298,607 in lifetime cashes and 11 final tables of his own, sat on 389,000.

Among those who fell short of the final two tables: John Juanda, a five-time bracelet winner with $9.33 million in lifetime earnings and 48 WSOP final tables, busted in 16th place. Joseph McKeehen, the 2015 Main Event champion with $2.40 million in lifetime cashes, went out 17th. Andrew Yeh, a one-time bracelet winner with $1.74 million in earnings, fell 18th. Hanh Tran, who traveled from Austria with $201,206 in career earnings and two final tables, exited 19th.

These are not recreational players who wandered into the wrong ballroom. Juanda alone has more final-table appearances (48) than many players have tournament entries. The names that fell between 27 and 15 included Daniel Blum ($278,471 in lifetime earnings) and Brian Tate ($557,443, seven career final tables). Every elimination at this stage represents a skilled specialist going home.

And at the top of the counts sat a Brunson.

The Weight of the Name

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being the son of Doyle Brunson. It is not the pressure of expectation so much as the pressure of comparison. Doyle's ten bracelets, his two Main Event titles, his best-selling strategy book, his six decades in the game: these are not benchmarks any child can reasonably be measured against. They are the achievements of a singular figure in the history of the sport.

Todd has never seemed to chase his father's shadow so much as occupy an adjacent room in the same house. He plays the games Doyle loved, in the rooms Doyle helped build, with a skill set that overlaps substantially with Doyle's own. But he has done it quietly, in the events that don't make the broadcast schedule, against fields that might number 50 or 80 or, in the case of a $10K Triple Draw championship, something even smaller.

His 18 career final tables are the résumé of a player who shows up, year after year, to the events that reward deep expertise in formats most of the poker world has stopped studying. His $2.78 million in lifetime WSOP earnings is not a number that gets him on magazine covers. It is, however, a number that reflects three decades of competition at the highest levels of games that don't generate headlines.

One bracelet in seventeen years of trying is both unremarkable (most players never win one at all) and quietly agonizing (eighteen final tables means eighteen shots, and only one conversion). The gap between "very good" and "gold" is measured in single cards, in one draw that doesn't get there, in one limit bet on fifth street that gets raised when you needed it to check through.

What the Game Remembers

Doyle Brunson passed away in May 2023. The poker world mourned publicly. Tributes filled social media for weeks. "Texas Dolly" had been the game's gravitational center for so long that his absence felt structural, as if someone had removed a load-bearing wall from the poker room itself.

Todd kept playing.

He has kept playing through every shift in the game's identity: through the Moneymaker boom, through the solver revolution, through the migration to online and the migration back to live, through the inflation of Main Event fields from hundreds to thousands, through the slow attrition of the mixed-game schedule. He has kept playing the games his father taught him, in the rooms his father helped make famous.

Now, at Event #67 of the 2026 WSOP, he sits on a chip lead with 15 players remaining in the $10,000 Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw Championship. The field around him includes three-time bracelet winners and Main Event champions. The game they are playing is one that the modern poker economy treats as a specialty item, a niche within a niche.

And Todd Brunson, at 57, with his single bracelet and his famous last name and his father's ghost somewhere in the architecture of every Las Vegas poker room, is in position to win it.

The Draw

Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw is a game of patience, reads, and discipline. You are dealt five cards. You want to make the worst possible poker hand (no pairs, no straights, no flushes; the best hand is 2-3-4-5-7). You get three draws to replace cards, with a round of limit betting after each draw. The game rewards players who can read opponents' draw patterns, manage their own hand-building across multiple streets, and exercise the kind of disciplined aggression that limit structures demand.

It is, in other words, a game that rewards experience. Solvers exist for it, but the edge in Triple Draw is not primarily computational. It lives in the accumulated knowledge of thousands of hours at the table: knowing what a one-card draw on the third round looks like when the bettor has been standing pat on the second, understanding the texture of a check-raise from a player who drew two on the first round.

Todd Brunson has been accumulating that knowledge for roughly three decades. His chip stack of 1,580,000 at the two-table mark reflects it. Between the 27-player milestone and the 15-player milestone, he more than quadrupled his stack from 382,000 to 1,580,000 while the field lost nearly half its players.

That kind of accumulation in a limit game is not a heater. Limit structures prevent the kind of wild variance that characterizes No Limit tournaments. Building a stack like that, in a game like this, against a field like this, requires sustained, correct play over hundreds of hands.

It requires, in fact, exactly the kind of poker Todd Brunson has been playing his entire career.

What Comes Next

The $10,000 Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw Championship will play down to a winner. Todd Brunson may win it. He may not. Naoya Kihara, with three bracelets and 496,000 chips, is perfectly capable of running him down. Mark Roland, with 389,000 and the quiet confidence of a player with 11 final tables and three Circuit rings, could make a move.

But the outcome of this single tournament is less interesting than what it represents. Todd Brunson leading Event #67 is a snapshot of a particular moment in poker's history: the moment when the games that built the sport are still being played at the championship level, but the players who play them are aging, and the schedule that houses them is shrinking, and the attention economy that sustains modern poker has its cameras pointed somewhere else entirely.

The Brunson name will always mean something at the WSOP. Doyle made sure of that. But what it means is changing. It used to mean ten bracelets and two Main Event trophies and the most famous hand in poker. Now it means a 57-year-old man with one bracelet, sitting behind a chip lead in a draw game at six in the morning, seventeen years deep into a quest that the rest of the poker world barely notices.

The next card is about to come off the deck.