While Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier has become one of the best poker players of all-time, the one knock against him is that he hasn’t won a WSOP bracelet. However, this all changed when Grospellier won the $10,000 Seven Card Stud Championship at the 2011 WSOP.
The Frenchman cruised through a 126-player field that included some incredible players such as Alexander Kostritsyn (5th place), Chad Brown (6th place), Nick Schulman (9th place), Men Nguyen (10th place), Ville Wahlbeck (12th place), Jason Mercier (14th place) and Matthew Hawrilenko (16th place). After winning, ElkY hauled in $331,639 and joined the prestigious triple crown club (EPT, WPT and WSOP title).
Previously, the only players to win the triple crown included Gavin Griffin, Roland De Wolfe and Jake Code (via 2011 WSOP). Now Grospellier has cemented himself further into poker lore by becoming only the fourth person to win the triple crown.
As far as Grospellier’s march to the incredible accomplishment goes, he kicked things off by winning the 2008 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. ’08 turned out to be a great year for ElkY as he went on to capture the WPT Championship title as well. But as quickly as WPT and EPT success came, Grospellier had to wait quite some time before he finally tasted true WSOP success.
Fortunately for him, the time has finally come, and he can now add WSOP hardware to his already impressive list of accomplishments. With the Seven Card Stud Championship now under his belt, Grospellier now has almost $8 million in live tournament winnings, which ranks him 25th on the all-time money list. And since ElkY puts a lot of focus on live tournaments, you can bet that he will be moving up on the list over the next few years.