Alessio La Francesca closed out a year and a half of near misses on September 14, when the Italian grinder won Event #21 of the 2026 World Series of Poker Online, the $1,500 GGMasters Freezeout Championship on GGPoker, for $316,037, a WSOP bracelet, and a $30,000 Super Pass into the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event. He got there by outlasting a field that produced one of the loudest Brazilian showings of the entire online series, with three Brazilian grinders reaching the nine handed final table without quite closing the deal.
Inside the $1,500 GGMasters Freezeout Championship
Event #21 drew 1,515 entries to GGPoker, a number that shows how much weight the GGMasters brand carries inside the WSOP Online schedule even at a mid-range $1,500 buy-in. With that many bodies at the felt, the prize pool built out to somewhere north of $2.27 million before the site’s fee, enough to pay a deep run of five-figure and six-figure scores well past the unofficial final table. As a freezeout, the format offered no rebuys or add-ons, so every elimination on Day 1 was final, which tends to reward patience early and aggression once antes kick in and stacks compress toward the money bubble.
By the time the field reached its last nine players, the table included representatives from Italy, Finland, Mexico, and Brazil, a spread typical of GGPoker’s global reach during the WSOP Online series. La Francesca came into the unofficial final table without a commanding stack, but freezeout championships of this size are usually decided by who survives the middle stages rather than who simply accumulates chips early, and that dynamic played to his favor as shorter stacks around him were forced into confrontations.
Three Brazilians Chase the Bracelet
The headline for Brazilian fans was not the winner but how deep the country’s contingent ran. Vinicius Escossi, playing under the screen name “DaddysRun,” was the last Brazilian standing, bowing out in fifth place for $111,735, comfortably his largest reported score of the series. Right behind him, Artur Berg fell in sixth for $86,159, and Gustavo Pinto closed out the trio in seventh for $66,438. Having three players from the same country at a single WSOP Online final table is a notable feat given the size of the field, and it extended a run that had already seen Brazilian players claim five bracelets earlier in the 2026 WSOP Online series.
None of the three Brazilians has the name recognition of a multiple bracelet winner yet, but results like this are how that recognition gets built. Readers newer to bracelet formats and how freezeouts differ from rebuy or bounty structures can find a breakdown of the different WSOP event types in Poker Pro Academy’s WSOP guide, which is a useful primer before diving into a series with dozens of overlapping formats running at once.
La Francesca’s Long Road to a Bracelet
For La Francesca, the win capped a pursuit that had been building since at least the previous year’s live series. He had reached the final two tables of the 2,000 euro No-Limit Hold’em Monster Stack event at the 2025 WSOP Europe festival in Rozvadov, only to bust in 11th place, agonizingly short of the unofficial final table and the deeper money that comes with it. That near miss appears to have stuck with him, since players who talk about chasing a first bracelet for over a year tend to treat every deep run afterward as unfinished business rather than a good result on its own.
This time there was no near miss. La Francesca’s stack held up through the final table’s swings, and when the last hand was dealt heads up he had enough of a cushion to see it through. The $316,037 payday is by a wide margin the biggest of his tracked career, and the bracelet itself changes his profile inside GGPoker’s ecosystem, where WSOP Online titles carry weight similar to a live bracelet in terms of prestige even if the buy-in was a fraction of what live Las Vegas events demand.
What the Result Means for the Series
Event #21 landed in the middle stretch of the 2026 WSOP Online calendar, a series that runs dozens of bracelet events across weeks of overlapping schedules on GGPoker. For Brazil specifically, the tournament reinforced a pattern that has defined the country’s 2026 online season: depth rather than just headline winners. Five bracelets already secured before this event, combined with three players reaching a single final table here, suggests the talent pool extends well past the handful of Brazilian names that make headlines internationally.
For La Francesca, the immediate benefit beyond the cash is the $30,000 Super Pass, which buys him direct entry into the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event, a live festival that has quickly become one of the most talked about stops on the calendar since its move to the Bahamas. That means his online breakthrough now comes with a built-in shot at a much larger live score, assuming he chooses to use the pass rather than sell or trade it, which some online-focused players do when live travel does not fit their schedule.
As with any tournament result, it is worth remembering these are legal, 18-plus events built around calculated risk rather than guaranteed income, and both winners and min-cashers absorbed real variance to get where they landed. Escossi, Berg, and Pinto will all be back at the tables soon enough, and given how the 2026 WSOP Online series has gone for Brazilian players so far, nobody should be surprised if one of them is holding a bracelet of their own before the series wraps.
