Melika Razavi wins WSOP bracelet to go with her Miss Iran Global Sash

Posted on: September 7, 2020 08:26 PDT

Melika Razavi splits her time between careers as a poker player, a motivational speaker, and a magician. She is the face of Pokerita — the "number one Persian poker site" — and an online poker site. And she has had a few impressive showings at previous poker tournaments. These include a 17th place finish at last year’s EPT Monte Carlo main event.

She was also 2016’s Miss Iran Global.

This weekend she picked a bracelet to go with that sash. And $239,180 in cash.

The WSOP Online Event #82: $1,050 Beat the Pros (Bounty) went up to bat Saturday at 2:00 PM Eastern Time. The game had a progressive bounty, starting at $250 and increasing as the eliminations tick up.

Thirteen hours after kick-off, in the wee hours of Sunday morning (Eastern Time again), the field had been cleared out and Razavi was the only one left at the tables.

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The pageantry of poker

Stacks and blinds started at 25k and 150/300/25 respectively. Players were allowed up to two rebuys. If you knocked a player out, you earned bounty.

By the end of late reg, there were 2,024 entries, for a total prize pool of $2,024. How that got split up would depend as much on the distribution of bounties as it would any given player’s final position.

True to its name, there were also plenty of pros to beat in the field. Kristen Bicknell, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Dvoress, Danny Tang, Manig Loeser, and Andrew Neeme were all in play from early on.

Along with enough bracelets to stock a Vegas pawn shop this event even sported an Olympic gold medalist — Yevgeny Kafelnikov, whose gold was for tennis.

The bubble burst at level 18. By level 19 Razavi was in the top ten for chip counts. By level 25, with around 70 players left, she was in fifth. And by the final table, she was in 3rd with 7.9 million in chips.

Peter "BIG CHI" Chien was in first at that point with 10.7 million in chips. But not for long. Chien went out in 7th, sent to the rail by Andre "ubermensch1" Difelice (3rd - $114,413).

The final table was one of the toughest we’ve seen all series with high stakes killers like Mike Leah, Marting Zamani, and Elio Fox in play. Razavi ended up having to beat WPT champ and WSOPC ring-wearer Dylan Linde heads up to win the tourney.

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Miss Played

Heads up play started with near identical stacks. Just a few million between the players, with 50.6 million in chips on the table. That changed drastically a few hands in when Linde was forced to lay down his hand on the river in a 15 million chip pot.

After that, with a 3-1 lead Razavi just had to keep the pressure on.

The final hand came when Linde picked up Q-3 offsuit in the big blind. Razavi checked and Linde followed suit.

The flop came K-K-3 with two clubs. Rinde checked his bottom pair, and Razavi checked behind.

The turn came the 5.

Razavi made a small bet, and Rinde called with showdown equity and no real value in bluffing. The fiver was the four of hearts. Razavi checked. Linde ran down all the possible hands Razavi could be holding, and reluctantly shoved the rest of his short stack in.

Razavi snap-called. She had slow-played K-4. The bracelet was hers.