Patrick Leonard. Credit: Venetian Poker Room X account.
The summer of 2025 featured a lot of close calls for CoinPoker Ambassador Patrick Leonard. The prolific online poker player, boasting over $28 million in career results, had his eyes on his second career World Series of Poker bracelet in early June. Leonard reached the semifinals of the $25,000 WSOP heads-up championship, before falling to eventual champion Artur Martirosian.
There were numerous other chances throughout June and July, but after the WSOP wrapped up, it appeared Leonard wouldn’t be adding any hardware to his suitcase before his trip back to the U.K. He had one last chance in event no. 90 of the Venetian DeepStack Championship series, a $1,600 buy-in, $750,000 guarantee event over the weekend.
Leonard ultimately prevailed, capturing the $164,108 first-place prize, the trophy, and the Venetian DeepStack gold coin. The win in the 737-entry event, which exceeded the guarantee and generated a prize pool of $1,046,540, was a fitting conclusion to Leonard’s summer. It earned him 912 points in the Card Player Player of the Year race, presented by Coin Poker. That result pushed Leonard up to 44th in the POY standings. This was his second title and eighth POY-qualified final-table finish of 2025.
Final Table Features Drama, Several Stars
The final table action played out on a PokerGO stream from the Venetian Poker Studio. Joining Leonard among the final seven were bracelet winner Mitchell Halverson (7th – $27,346) and former World Poker Tour Venetian main event champion Qing Liu (4th – $62,957), who is second on the all-time earnings list for Venetian, having cashed for more than $1.7 million at the venue. Recent World Series of Poker $5,000 no-limit hold’em eight max champion Andrew Ostapchenko finished third for $85,472. This was the seventh final-table finish of the year for Ostapchenko, with three wins along the way. He now sits in third place in the POY rankings as a result.
There was some minor controversy that arose regarding chip stacking, chip counts, and table dialogue over the course of the stream. After his victory, Leonard explained his meticulousness about accurate chip counts in a social media post responding to a video clip of the mild drama.
This summer deep in the $777 a guy went all in for 1000+ starting stacks, but his hands were over his chips. The dealer confirmed the amount, the guy confirmed. I called and he had 25% extra hidden behind his stack and slid them out after he won the all in. I was very angry, but… https://t.co/GFt50t3Wxs
— Patrick Leonard 🫡 (@padspoker) July 19, 2025
A Strong Finish To A Busy Summer
He maintained a busy schedule following his WSOP heads-up championship run, which netted Leonard $180,000. Leonard went on to post seven additional top-100 finishes at the 2025 WSOP, including 9th in a $1,500 mixed Omaha event and 8th at the very end of the series in the $777 Lucky Sevens event.
Leonard now has 83 WSOP cashes to his credit, including one WSOP bracelet. He won the $1,000 tag team event in 2022 with Espen Jorstad, the Norwegian pro who would go on to win the WSOP main event that year for $10 million.
Final Table Results
| Place | Player | Payout | POY Points |
| 1 | Patrick Leonard | $164,108 | 912 |
| 2 | Derek Gregory | $117,624 | 760 |
| 3 | Andrew Ostapchenko | $85,472 | 608 |
| 4 | Qing Liu | $62,957 | 456 |
| 5 | Michael Cervantes | $47,015 | 380 |
| 6 | Ran Ilani | $35,603 | 304 |
| 7 | Mitchell Halverson | $27,346 | 228 |
