Everyone should be so unlucky.
Asher Conniff, after accidentally registering for a big-bucks Atlantic
City poker tournament, walked away a winner last week with the top prize
of $973,000.
The windfall from the World Poker Tour’s $15,000 buy-in championship
helped soothe his mom’s slightly ruffled feathers after the glitch
forced him to miss a scheduled family vacation.
“She wasn’t too upset,” said Conniff after his triumph at the Borgata
Hotel Casino & Spa. “She was happy I was going to play and she’s
super-ecstatic now.” Conniff, 25, was coming off the biggest score of
his career — a $203,000 jackpot on April 20 in the opening event of the
Borgata’s Spring Poker Open.
A few days later, he was set to play a $1,000 high-roller event on
Borgata’s online poker room — only to mistakenly misclick. Conniff
registered instead for a $1,600 satellite preliminary round of the
$15,000 live main event that started the following day at the Borgata.
The Brooklynite quickly realized his mistake, but the casino said he was out of luck.
Not for long, though.
He wound up winning the satellite and a seat into the prestigious championship.
As Conniff navigated his way through the star-studded, 239-player
field, word of his misclick spread through the Borgata poker room.
Surely, it was destiny that he would win it all?
“It’s funny because normally you’d say that,” he said. “But I had
literally just won a 2,400-person field tournament — my luck had to run
out sooner or later.”
That didn’t happen at the Borgata.
On Wednesday, Conniff came up aces to dominate the six-man final table
featuring Tony Dunst, Brian Yoon, Carlos Mortensen, Ray Qartomy and
eventual runner-up, Alexander Lakhov — each with more than $1.5 million
in career winnings. He faced almost no adversity in eliminating his
final five opponents in a little under five hours.
Prior to his $200,000 score, Conniff had only amassed $188,000 in
career winnings, but after last summer’s World Series of Poker in Las
Vegas, he rededicated himself to the game.
“I left the WSOP not broke but not far from it,” Conniff said. “I
needed to be all-in or fold, so to speak. I decided to go for it and cut
the B.S. and go 100%.
“If I was some random person looking at my numbers, nothing in my stats
says that I should do this. But I’m not that surprised because I threw
myself into the game and worked my tail off, so in my heart I knew how
good I am. It’s definitely validating.”
Conniff, who grew up in Prospect Heights, had seemingly all of the Borgata on his rail, cheering him on.
“I’ve always played the nice guy, and try to be personable at the
table,” he said. “It’s genuinely not my goal to do that to make money.
If you told me I could make more by being an a------, I wouldn’t do it.”
Matt Stout, a poker pro who, with more than $3 million in career
tournament winnings, lost to Conniff in the opening event of the series
provided commentary for the World Poker Tour’s live stream during his
final table win.
“It’s easy to go years of playing well and not getting what you
deserve,” Stout said. “Asher for sure got what he deserves. I’m so happy
for that kid.”
For an encore, he’s going to treat his family to the vacation he missed. And then?
“Gonna win three (World Series of Poker) bracelets and the Main Event,” he joked.
Don’t bet against him.
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