Max Neugebauer Wins 2023 WSOP Europe Main Event for €1.5M

Max Neugebauer won the 2023 World Series of Poker Europe Main Event for €1,500,000. The 26-year-old Austrian bested 816 opponents to become the latest poker world champion, amazingly as a relative novice in his latest career choice. Neugebauer had a live tournament career record of $84,000 before the 2023 WSOP Europe Main Event. Neugebauer was a former professional basketball player.

Neugebauer's victory was his first major poker win. The six-foot, eight inches giant was easy to spot during the last two weeks. At one point he was seen trying to satellite into the Main Event on the cheap but didn’t manage to follow through.

The latter stages of the Main Event gave the viewers some incredible poker action. Some great pots mixed up with the occasional flutter of brutal bad beats. Michael Rocco fell foul of a particularly cruel sequence. In one hand he woke up with aces in a perfect set up for Nils Pudel to jam into him. But in the very next hand Ting Tsai woke up with aces and Rocco jammed into him with ace-nine off. Then it was all over and the American was heading home, out in fifth place. Michele Tocci was another hit particularly hard. It was starting to look like Neugebauer and Tocci would be heads-up rivals but then Tocci lost an all-in confrontation with sixes to Tsai’s pocket deuces. In the very next hand he was able to get jacks in against Neugebauer who held king-four, but a king on the river sent a stunned Tocci to the rail on the wrong end of a close to $300k pay-jump.