The Stud Event Has a Chip Leader Who Actually Plays Stud

Jonathan Glendinning has 1,024,000 chips, $507K in lifetime earnings, a WSOP Circuit ring, and the chip lead with 16 players left in the $1,500 Seven Card Stud at the 2026 WSOP — and I think he's about to remind everyone what happens when a credentialed Stud player actually runs good.

Look at the two-table field around him. The next-biggest stack belongs to Yunlamkevin Choi at 440,000 — a player from the UK with $312K in career cashes and three final tables. Ilkka Heikkila sits at 365,000 with $36,569 lifetime. Christopher Chung has 274,000 and no recorded tournament results at all. Parth Jha, who led this event earlier on Day 2 at 565,000, has collapsed to 87,000 with zero bracelets, zero rings, and no tracked earnings.

Glendinning nearly tripled his stack from 297,000 to over a million while the field contracted from 22 to 16. That's not a heater. That's a Stud player doing Stud-player things — reading boards, remembering dead cards, punishing the tourists who wandered into the wrong game.

Glendinning nearly tripled his stack from 297,000 to over a million while the field contracted from 22 to 16.

The Counter-Argument

Sure, you could argue credentials don't matter once the cards are in the air — that Stud is high-variance and any competent player with a stack can get there. Fine. But Stud rewards memory, discipline, and pattern recognition in ways that No-Limit Hold'em simply doesn't, and those skills compound over six final tables and half a million in cashes. You don't stumble into a WSOPC ring playing Stud.

Why This Matters

The $1,500 Stud is one of the last WSOP events where an old-guard specialist can still leverage thousands of hours of format-specific reps. The Hold'em and PLO fields are full of solver kids who've logged more GTO Wizard hours than live hands. But nobody's solving Seven Card Stud in a training app. The edge here is biographical — it lives in the player, not the software.

Glendinning is second in lifetime earnings among the named players at these final two tables. Only William Berry ($1.9M, four rings, 31 final tables) and Todd Brunson ($2.4M, one bracelet, 17 final tables) outrank him — and both were visible at the 22-player mark but didn't surface in the top stacks at 16. Glendinning did. He surged while the bigger names faded.

With 16 left and a commanding lead, this is Glendinning's bracket to lose. I'm not saying it's a lock. I'm saying if you had to pick one player at these two tables whose entire career was built for this exact moment, the answer is obvious.