Ryan Brown Wins World Series Of Poker Circuit Council Bluffs Main Event

Ryan Brown came out on top in the 2025 World Series of Poker Circuit main event at Horseshoe Council Bluffs in Iowa. A long final day of play saw Brown take home his first gold ring along with $85,239. That victory includes a $5,000 WSOP Paradise prize package in the Bahamas. The poker player from Texas took his career earnings past $1.1 million with the win.

“There’s a ton of ups and downs in poker and poker tournaments, life, you can’t just expect it to go all up all the time. Chris [Rodriguez] definitely made my life hard at the final table the entire time, not just heads-up. He played great, and I was fortunate to turn it around and win a flip in the end,” Brown told Poker.Org reporters after the win.

He continued, “I go to some of the bigger ones, Cherokee, I go there a lot, and it’s tough to beat 1,500 people. Here, you come thinking you at least have a chance when there’s 250 runners or whatever. I think it’s kind of smart to seek out some of the smaller fields so you have a little bit more consistency and you can have that chance to win a ring or a title. This is a high variance game and the bigger the field, the more the variance, and the tougher it is to just do this consistently. It’s great. It’s very hard to win a poker tournament, and these wins don’t come around too often, so you’ve got to enjoy them.”

The $1,700 buy-in no-limit hold’em poker tournament had two starting flights that saw a field of 275 entries take a seat. That set the total prize pool at $401,475. The final 29 players all scored at least $4,355, and Day 2 saw them return for what turned out to be a long march to a winner over the course of 13 hours of action.

Brown enter second in chips, and by the time the final table began he had improved his position to the top stack in play. Jay Phillips then busted in ninth place to kick off the endgame, and eighth place went to Steve Pham soon thereafter.

Christopher Rodriguez got the next knockouts by taking out Nick Raio in seventh place and Donald Nimneh in sixth to start his rise through the ranks to the final match. However, Brown was still at the top when they hit the dinner break with five remaining.

Brown claimed his first bustout at the final table after dinner when he sent Kyle Schmidt home in fifth place. William Ellis followed to the exit doors after that in fourth. Brown was still cruising at the top of the chip counts, and he kept that momentum rolling by busting Eric Vogler in third place.

The stacks were about 3:2 in advantage of Brown at the start of heads-up play with Rodriguez not too far behind. A back-and-forth battle saw Rodriguez pull ahead for a bit. But Brown got on the comeback trail to take the lead before the final hand.

That hand saw Rodriguez get all in preflop with pocket tens in the hole, and Brown had him covered holding A♥K♠. The final board read J♠9♠5♠4♦3♠, and the flush on the river gave Brown the tournament title. Rodriguez was out with the runner-up finish for a cash worth $56,852, and that gave the multiple-time online ring winner his largest live payday yet.

Final Table Results

Photo credit: WSOP / Poker.Org.