Antonio Vargas has been on quite the run recently. The four largest scores of his poker tournament career have all come in outright wins, and all since last August. The biggest of all was his most recent. The Colorado native defeated a field of 2,148 entries in the $1,700 U.S. Circuit Championship no-limit hold’em event at the 2026 World Series of Poker to earn $439,605 and his first gold bracelet.
This victory increased Vargas’ lifetime haul to nearly $1.6 million. Over $961,000 of that comes from his aforementioned slew of recent triumphs. He started with a win at the 2025 MSPT Poker State Championship for $141,255 on Aug. 3. Roughly six weeks later, he took down the Colorado Summer Poker Championship for another $73,090. Then, in December of 2025 he came out on top in a $1,600 buy-in at the WPT World Championship festival for $307,794.
This breakthrough win in Las Vegas came with 1,080 Card Player Player of the Year points for Vargas. This was his first POY-qualified score of 2026, but it alone was sufficient to move him inside the top 300 in the overall standings presented by CoinPoker.
“The people that know, know that it means a lot to me,” Vargas told PokerNews live reporters covering the event. “It just means everything to me right now.”
The sizable turnout for this event inside Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas made for a $3,231,666 prize pool, with 324 players earning a share. Notables who ran deep included Angela Jordison (50th), Lexy Gavin-Mather (23rd), Robert Kuhn (15th), Pei Li (14th), Shawn Daniels (7th), and Kartik Ved (3rd). This was Ved’s second third-place showing of the festival. The bracelet winner from India cashed for $211,817 just days after placing third in the Mini Mystery Millions for $200,000. He now has over $2.4 million in recorded scores.
Final Table Results
| Place | Player | Payout | POY Points |
| 1 | Antonio Vargas | $439,605 | 1,080 |
| 2 | Kai Cohen | $292,916 | 900 |
| 3 | Kartik Ved | $211,817 | 720 |
| 4 | Michael Plesa | $154,853 | 540 |
| 5 | Liubomyr Melnyk | $114,465 | 450 |
| 6 | Malcolm Franchi | $85,561 | 360 |
| 7 | Shawn Daniels | $64,681 | 270 |
| 8 | Scott Horvath | $49,459 | 180 |
| 9 | Yannick Capocetti | $38,258 | 90 |
Photo credits: WSOP / Tyler Abrams.
