Alexander Kostritsyn walked away from tournament poker fourteen years ago to focus on cash games, and his first cash back at the tables in eight years turned out to be a career-defining one. Kostritsyn won the 2026 WSOP $25,000 High Roller H.O.R.S.E., Event #97, for $872,052, taking down his first career bracelet in a field stacked with some of the toughest mixed-game players in the world.
A Cash Game Grinder Returns to the Felt
Kostritsyn’s résumé reads unlike most bracelet winners. He stepped away from tournament play roughly fourteen years ago, choosing to build his reputation and bankroll almost entirely in high-stakes cash games instead. Event #97 marked his first tournament cash in eight years, which makes the result less a continuation of a tournament career and more a one-off raid on the WSOP by a player who had spent over a decade proving himself in a different format entirely. That background matters in H.O.R.S.E., a rotating mixed game that rewards the kind of deep, format-spanning fundamentals cash game specialists tend to build over years of six-figure sessions rather than tournament reps.
Beating Some of the Game’s Best Mixed-Game Players
The field for Event #97 was not a soft one. Among the players chasing points on the WSOP Player of the Year leaderboard at the table were Alex Foxen, Shaun Deeb, and Naoya Kihara, three of the most consistent tournament grinders in the game. Kostritsyn eliminated Deeb during the event on his way to the final table, a notable scalp given Deeb had already picked up his ninth career bracelet earlier in the same series. Getting through a field that included that level of tournament-hardened talent, using a format that rotates between five separate games, is a strong signal that Kostritsyn’s cash game instincts translated directly to the tournament structure once he sat back down.
A Heads-Up Battle to Close It Out
Kostritsyn’s run through the field ended in a heads-up battle against Ali Eslami, another accomplished high-stakes player with a deep tournament résumé of his own. Eslami had to settle for the runner-up finish as Kostritsyn closed out the title, capping off a field that had been trimmed down through five separate poker variants before the two players were left to decide the bracelet. Winning a mixed-game high roller heads-up against a player of Eslami’s caliber is itself a difficult task, since H.O.R.S.E. heads-up play rewards contestants who can switch gears cleanly between games rather than leaning on a single specialty to carry them through.
Why H.O.R.S.E. Still Matters at the WSOP
H.O.R.S.E., which cycles through Hold’em, Omaha eight-or-better, Razz, Seven Card Stud, and Stud eight-or-better, has long been treated by tournament regulars as one of the purer tests of overall poker skill on the WSOP calendar. Because no single game dominates the format, players cannot lean on one specialty to carry them through an entire tournament the way they might in a straight no-limit hold’em event. The $25,000 buy-in keeps the field relatively small and experienced, which is part of why a result like Kostritsyn’s, an outsider by tournament standards beating a run of Player of the Year contenders, tends to draw so much attention inside the poker community even when it does not generate mainstream headlines.
An Eight-Year Gap Between Cashes
The eight-year gap since Kostritsyn’s last tournament cash is the detail that separates this story from a typical bracelet run. Most players who show up to compete for a $25,000 buy-in have logged dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tournament reps in the years leading up to it, refining their multi-table instincts against a steady rotation of the same regulars. Kostritsyn instead arrived with almost no recent tournament data points on the record, relying purely on the reads and hand-reading instincts built at the cash tables. That gap makes the result harder to explain away as a hot run built on tournament sharpness, and easier to read as evidence that elite cash game skill can translate directly into a tournament setting once a player decides to sit down and test it.
What the Win Means Going Forward
For Kostritsyn, the $872,052 score and the bracelet arrive as a validation of a career built almost entirely away from the tournament spotlight. Whether this result pulls him back toward a heavier tournament schedule or ends up as a one-time detour before he returns to cash games remains an open question, but it adds a significant data point to the long-running debate over how directly cash game skill transfers to tournament formats. Readers looking to sharpen the fundamentals that carry across both formats, from hand reading to bankroll discipline, can find a starting point in Poker Pro Academy’s poker hand rankings guidea useful refresher before tackling a rotating game like H.O.R.S.E. For now, Kostritsyn’s name joins the list of 2026 WSOP bracelet winners on the strength of a single, deep run that outlasted three Player of the Year contenders and an Eslami heads-up battle to close it out.
