Thursday, October 20, 2016 6:02 PM Local Time
John Holley Wins Another Ring, More than $30,000
Florida pro rides his instincts, premonitions to a fifth-career Circuit victory
Hammond, Indiana (October 20, 2016) — John Holley is the champion of Event #6 at Horseshoe Hammond, defeating a field of 232 players to win the $580 Six-Max event. The victory is Holley’s fifth on the WSOP Circuit, putting him in elite company as one of only 14 players with at least five rings. He also collected the top prize of $31,318 and 50 points in the race for seats in the season-ending Global Casino Championship.
Holley is a 55-year-old professional poker player from Destin, Florida. He used to fish competitively, but he took on poker as his full-time profession several years ago after finding some good success in tournaments. After this victory, only nine players have won more rings on the WSOP Circuit than Holley.
There was a lot of history and premonition in play for Holley at the final table of this event. The first evidence of that came with five players remaining, when Holley was absent from the table for the first 15 minutes following a break. Cody Brinn had been using a green crystal as his card protector, and it had jogged Holley’s memory about his own good luck charm. The last time he won a ring, he’d given much of the credit to “Rocky” — a small, nondescript rock that protected his cards for the duration of that event. He had found the special stone several years prior on the shores of Lake Texoma in the deep south.
Holley decided he needed to go find Rocky again on this day, so he took the long walk to his car during the break. “I had sort of retired him,” he said when he returned. “I hardly ever use him anymore. I’m out there digging through my car trying to find him, and I actually could only find a piece of him.” Rocky lost a big chunk of himself somewhere along the way, and Holley finally returned to the table with his new, smaller protector that he aptly named “Chip”.
A couple hours later, Holley and Brinn were heads-up for the ring, with Holley holding a significant chip lead. In the decisive hand, Holley opened the button with a raise, and Brinn three-bet shoved for about 25 big blinds. Holley only had ten-eight offsuit, but he paused for a long while to consider, hinting at a premonition. He walked through his and long and unusual decision-making process in the postgame conversation:
It began several years ago, when Holley saw a movie in which the protagonist was a poker playing fisherman, just like Holley himself. “He’d make his money fishing, and then they’d cheat him out of the poker game,” he started the story. “It was a crooked game. They had the dealer working for them and everything. The hand he won with was ten-eight offsuit. Somehow, they talked the dealer into not cheating for that hand, so they actually had to play it out. And he won with ten-eight offsuit. It was just weird, and I felt like something was speaking to me about that hand.”
A short while later, Holley was heads-up for what was his third ring at the time, and he won the final hand and the tournament with that exact hand — ten-eight offsuit.
When Brinn shoved on him this time, Holley had the familiar hand once again, this time with the suits reversed. “I’m sitting there going through this in my head,” he said. “How can I not call with ten-eight offsuit? I felt like I was told to play it.”
Holley listened to his instincts and called off a significant chunk of his own stack to put Brinn at risk. Brinn tabled pocket fives, racing for his tournament life against the ten-eight. “It was pretty sick that it was a flip spot,” Holley laughed. There was a ten right in the window, and the board ran out in Holley’s favor to seal the victory.
The champ elaborated further on how he uses his intuition to assist his decisions at the poker table. “People talk about feel players and math players,” he said. “And I think everything in the world is based about math. The whole universe. But there’s something about being receptive to positive energy that people disregard a lot of times.”
Holly is a particularly spiritual person, and he believes firmly in some form of higher energy that he can’t quite explain. Whatever it is, it’s working for him so far. “It doesn’t really matter what you pray to, as long as you believe,” he said. “I win or lose with a smile on my face, and I’m happy about that.”