Calvin Anderson won his seventh World Series of Poker bracelet on Sunday, taking down Event #54: the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship for $413,580 — and he did it barely a week after collecting his sixth. The 38-year-old beat a 189-runner field and outlasted Josh Arieh in a heads-up duel that ended when Anderson’s flush ran down Arieh’s straight in Seven Card Stud.
The win makes Anderson just the 18th player in WSOP history to reach seven bracelets. More striking is how he got there: by going back-to-back in $10,000 championship events. That is a feat so scarce that, before this summer, almost no one had managed it twice in a single series. The last name to join that club was Japan’s Naoya Kihara, who weeks earlier strung together the $10,000 2-7 and Stud Championships — a run that pushed the country’s first-ever bracelet winner to the top of Japan’s all-time list. Anderson now shares that rarefied air with him.
Five hours, three players, one stubborn chip leader
Anderson returned to the Paris Las Vegas ballroom as the chip leader of the final 11 and never really let go. Brian Yoon and Ariel Mantel went early, and the final table thinned quickly as Chris Brewer, David Lin, Nicolas Milgrom and David Bach all hit the rail. Then it bogged down. Arieh spiked an ace on seventh street to bust Robert Mizrachi in fifth, sent Yannick Jobin out in fourth, and the table settled into a three-handed grind that dragged on for close to five hours.
It got testy, too — Anderson and John Veltri traded words after Veltri was ruled short of a legal raise. The chip lead changed hands again and again until Anderson finally pushed past 8 million and shoved Veltri out in third with a straight in Stud Hi-Lo. He started heads-up with a commanding 8.7 million to 2.64 million edge over Arieh, and although the four-time bracelet winner doubled once, the future Hall of Famer couldn’t climb back.
The quiet specialist’s edge
Anderson has built his record on mixed games and a low-drama approach. His seven titles span Stud Hi-Lo, two Razz Championships, the Eight-Game Mix and now H.O.R.S.E., and he credits stamina at marathon final tables to a deliberately plain routine. “I take a good bit of supplements. I don’t drink. I eat pretty clean,” he said, noting that a rival who had been drinking faded as the night wore on.
His real weapon is adaptability. Ahead of the final table he canvassed friends about which opponents were strong in which disciplines, then leaned into the stud games where he felt he had the edge while steering clear of others’ best formats. “I just want to feel forward,” he said of his refusal to count bracelets. “I’m just thinking about the next thing.”
The next thing is a big one. The double bracelet vaults Anderson to second in the Player of the Year race — a title he insists he never set out to chase — and he heads straight into the $50,000 Poker Players Championship, the toughest mixed-game tournament on the calendar. Kihara, meanwhile, is still deep in the high-roller schedule, keeping Japan’s breakout summer alive. With 45 bracelets still to be handed out before the Main Event, the two most in-form mixed-game players of 2026 may not be done writing history.