Alan Keating entered his first World Series of Poker event of 2026, then decided a suite at the Sphere was a better use of his Saturday night.
The cash game specialist signed up for Day 1b of Event #7, the $25,000 Heads-Up No-Limit Hold'em Championship, paid the full buy-in, and then never showed up to play it. His chips sat there getting blinded down while the tournament staff waited. Eventually he called in to say he was running late and was conceding the match outright.
That handed Piotr Krupa a free pass into round two of the 128-player bracket, where he'll meet the winner of Adrian Mateos versus Nikita Kuznetsov. Krupa didn't have to win a single hand. He just had to exist on the right side of the schedule.
So why does a man walk away from twenty-five grand without seeing a flop?
Money, mostly. Or rather, the fact that Keating already had so much of it that the buy-in barely registered. Earlier in the week he ran up over $1 million in profit on a livestreamed cash game at The Lodge Card Club in Texas, a session so brutal he lost the single biggest pot of the night and still left seven figures ahead. When that's your Tuesday, a $25K heads-up entry starts to look like a parking fee.
When PokerNews editors reached him about the no-show, Keating's explanation had nothing to do with poker strategy and everything to do with being a human who'd had a long week. He said he was worn out from the Lodge marathon and had a suite booked for No Doubt at the Sphere that night, and wanted to be rested enough to actually enjoy it. Gwen Stefani over a bracelet shot. Hard to argue with the priorities.
There's a clean financial logic underneath the chaos, too. Keating is set to play the Hustler Casino Live Million Dollar Game at the WSOP on June 12, the kind of cash game where a single pot can dwarf the entire heads-up buy-in he just torched. He can win the $25K back in one hand and probably will, without ever pretending to care about tournament variance.
The rest of the bracket took the event a good deal more seriously. Day 1 trimmed the field of 64 down to eight survivors, and the marquee result was Michael Mizrachi ending Phil Hellmuth's night in the headline clash of the bracket. Daniel Negreanu also advanced, sending Henry Castro home. Those guys actually showed up.
The $25K bracelet event continues with live reporting at PokerNews, and a stream of the second-round matchups goes live Saturday evening on YouTube. Keating will not be on it. He has a concert to attend.
