Jeremy Becker -- Young phenom, short-term luckbox, or "Postle of the Wynn"?

Prior to May 2023, nobody heard of Jeremy Becker. He quietly racked up over $800,000 in tournament cashes in small-midstakes tournaments which date back roughly five years. However, he had just four WSOP cashes, and had never hit a score over $36k.

That all changed when he started killing the Wynn daily tournaments. winning 5 times between April 24th and May 11th:

https://twitter.com/WynnPoker/status...27133309440001


Now he scored yet another victory on one of the Wynn dailies, making it his sixth first place finish in three weeks:

https://twitter.com/WynnPoker/status...84116783964161



So what's going on here?

Some people on the internet think he will be the breakout player of the 2023 WSOP.

Others think he's just getting really lucky, and will fall back to earth shortly.

Even others think he's able to dominate the weak fields of the Wynn dailies, but won't be able to run over tougher tournaments like the WSOP the same way.

And then there's a few conspiracy theorists calling him, "Postle of the Wynn", in reference to accused cheater Mike Postle.



It would not make sense to compare him to Postle, because these Wynn events aren't streamed, so there's no opportunity for production to signal him regarding opponents' hole cards. Could it be some other form of cheating, such as card marking? Anything's possible, but we have no evidence of that. People have hot runs all the time, and Becker's Hendon Mob shows what is at the very least a competent tournament player.

So what's happening?

First, understand that Becker is apparently hammering both the daily and nightly tournament at the Wynn, so he's getting two shots per day. This means his six wins, while highly impressive, probably occurred in a span of as many as 35 tries.

Second, these are not huge field events. The typically get fewer than 150 entrants. That's still not a cakewalk to beat, but it's not like he's got six wins in fields of 3000 entrants.

Third, these are fairly highly raked tournaments of $163+37, meaning players are forking over 18.5% in rake. Needless to say, with $163 per entrant going to the prize pool, you aren't getting Vegas' finest poker players entering. Most of the entrants are probably bad-to-mediocre Vegas locals. A good player like Becker could easily run them over, especially if getting lucky on top of that.

Daniel Negreanu took notice, and actually was willing to stake the kid:

https://twitter.com/RealKidPoker/sta...89324910010370
https://twitter.com/RealKidPoker/sta...90401331974144
https://twitter.com/RealKidPoker/sta...94374378074112

I actually think Negreanu is onto something here.

When a guy is going this well, while it might be luck, he's also playing with confidence. He also possibly has a style which is working against the current style of NL holdem play, and could be on a hot run until people learn to counter that.

Definitely worth taking a shot with a guy like that.