Anton Morgenstern is going to win the World Series of Poker. The only thing that will stop Morgenstern is an astonishing piece of bad luck. But Morgenstern doesn’t seem the type to suffer from that kind of thing, at least not this week. Morgenstern has shown no sign of letting up on a relentless progression through this main event field. Yesterday Morgenstern started with 400,000. Morgenstern finished with around 3 million. Now Morgenstern has around 15 million, and nobody seems to notice that he hasn’t lost chips since day four.

Morgenstern (have I said Morgenstern enough now?) has all the hallmarks of a main event winner.

As the wise already know, picking a main event winner is not about ability – all of the remaining players have that. Instead, it’s about profiling, or prejudice, depending on what side of the airport security line you’re on.

Anton Morgenstern

First of all, while Morgenstern is talented, he is not well known in the poker community, with only a couple of small cashes, albeit from big events. This is perfect. The most recent WSOP winners have been relatively obscure prior to their arrival in November.

Morgenstern is also young. All main event winners are young these days. He also has that ambivalent, insolent, foppish teenager look – perfect for the magazine covers he will grace

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, every attempt to jinx the man has failed completely. We’ve bigged him up endlessly and all he does is prove us right. Yesterday we even said he would “return to the Amazon Room and continue with his air of invincibility.”

We never believe a word of what we say and yet there’s been no sign at all of any glitch, or of fate dealing him a bad hand. Fate, it seems, is on his side. The poker gods have found their favourite.

Stephen Bartley is a PokerStars Blog reporter. Pictures courtesy of Poker Photo Archive.

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