Han Feng’s Poker Secret Is Out at the WSOP Main Event Final Table
The Houston player hid the game from his parents until February, then ran up a disciplined stack and locked up at least $1 million.
Han Feng will take a 25,000,000-chip stack into the WSOP Main Event final table, with at least $1 million already locked up after outlasting a field of 9,208 entries. He is one of nine players left, and the chip lead is a long way ahead of him, but his run is already the biggest moment of his poker life.
The personal side of the story is just as unusual. In a Poker.org profile, Feng said he did not tell his father he played poker until February this year because his parents had a very negative view of gambling. He said that view likely came from seeing friends lose a lot of money.
Now his father is watching every clip he can find. Feng said he has been glued to the free French stream, even though he does not really know what is happening, because he can see his son on TV.
Feng’s path to this spot was slow and careful. He said he finished a business degree before taking poker seriously, and even hauled a textbook to the poker room so he could read assigned work while playing cash games. He said his timeline started in 2019, when he was 20, but he was not old enough to play in the casino before COVID hit.
When the world opened back up, he started at $1/$3 and then moved to $2/$5 before scaling into tournaments. The profile described him as “the nittiest guy ever,” with a heavy focus on bankroll management, and said he had only two small WSOP cashes before this run, plus a few minor results around town.
PokerNews reported that Feng was the shortest stack left when he came back from the extended dinner break, but he then doubled through Lucas Jumalon when his king-high beat jack-high to lock up the final-table seat. Feng said he had been sitting on the break and basically accepting, “if I die, I die,” and added that it was the first time he had been all in for his tournament life in the event.
His path through the late stages was up and down. PokerNews said he was 24th of 533 players remaining by the end of Day 4, reached eight-figure stacks on Day 6, and also took some hits, including pocket nines getting cracked and a river ace beating his sixes. He eliminated Sean Winter on Day 6 and David Kluchman on Day 7, then briefly held the table chip lead before his stack slid under 10 big blinds.
Feng said he doubled his stack every day from Day 5 through Day 8 and kept himself from blowing up while others lost their minds slowly. He said he has “a lot of gym, a lot of study” planned for final-table prep and called it “locking in, like a boot camp,” but the final-table run has already changed the rest of his year, which he said had been heading toward a one-way trip to Europe after the WSOP.
WSOP.com said the final table returns on August 3 for a three-day finish, with ESPN2 carrying live coverage from 9:00 p.m. to midnight ET and edited programs premiering on August 10. The official site also said live Main Event streams will be available on WSOP’s YouTube in limited international markets where ESPN and Eurosport are not available.
