Maurice Hawkins won the Mini Main Event at the WSOP Circuit stop in Choctaw on Friday for $76,380 and his 26th gold ring, extending a record that already had nobody within shouting distance. It is the third ring of a year that has been running on two completely separate tracks, one of them on the felt and one of them on a federal court docket.
The felt track is going great.
He was drawing dead and won anyway
The final four at Choctaw was not a soft table. Ari Engel, who has a Circuit resume most players would trade a decade for, went out in fourth for $25,170. Will Givens followed in third for $35,450. That left Hawkins heads-up with Brian Green, and Green very nearly ended it.
By Hawkins's own account, Green ground him down to six big blinds. Anyone who has been on the wrong end of a heads-up match knows exactly what that stack feels like: you stop playing poker and start playing a slot machine with a slightly better RTP. Most players never come back from there. Hawkins did, and Green took $50,900 for second.
That is the part of the Hawkins story that survives every argument about him. Twenty-six rings is not variance. You cannot run good for eleven years.
Why the Circuit and not Vegas
Hawkins was candid about the difference between the Circuit and the summer in Las Vegas. His read, paraphrased: chip accumulation is easier away from Vegas because the fields simply are not as tough.
He is not wrong, and he is not being disrespectful by saying it. WSOP Circuit stops are regional events built around local player pools, weekend recreational traffic, and structures that reward experience and volume more than they reward GTO precision. Vegas in the summer concentrates the entire global player pool into one building. Hawkins spent his there and came out with a runner-up finish in the $600 NLH/PLO split, still bracelet-less, which remains the strangest line on his resume.
The Circuit is also a grind that most players are unwilling to do. Rings do not accumulate from playing three stops a year. They accumulate from living on the road, playing every event on the schedule at every stop, and treating a $400 buy-in with the same seriousness as a Main. Hawkins has set his sights on 200 rings, which sounds absurd until you remember the same thing was said about 20.
Off the table, he says the family is doing well, the kids are successful, his health is where he wants it, and he has zero worries.
That last one is the interesting part.
About the debt
In April we covered Hawkins filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Southern District of Florida, and the sequence around it was hard to read as coincidence. Ring No. 24 came at Elgin on April 6. A source in Tunica reported watching a Hawkins cashout get intercepted at the cage by a garnishment order. The Chapter 7 petition was filed the next day, April 23.
The creditor named in the filing is Randy Garcia, a former backer who won a $115,828 judgment out of Palm Beach County in 2019, later agreed to settle for $30,000 in monthly installments, and reportedly stopped receiving them after a few payments. Garcia's attorney, Rogen Chhabra, went on record saying they intended to fight the discharge on the grounds that Hawkins is not actually insolvent.
The petition itself supports that argument better than it should. Hawkins checked the box putting his assets between $500,001 and $1,000,000 and his liabilities between $100,001 and $500,000. He told a bankruptcy court, on the record, that he is worth more than he owes.
Our full breakdown of the filing is here: Maurice Hawkins Files Chapter 7 Days After Tunica Garnishment Hits His Cashout.
Three months later, there has been no publicly reported resolution. No announced discharge, no announced dismissal, no ruling on any objection. Chapter 7 consumer cases typically move through the trustee process in a few months, so a case filed in late April is in the window where something should be happening. Whether the U.S. Trustee looked hard at those asset numbers, whether Garcia's side actually filed the objection they promised, and where the judgment sits today are all questions nobody involved is answering.
What we do know is that Hawkins collected $76,380 at a cashier's cage in Oklahoma on Friday and no story emerged about it being frozen. That is not proof of a discharge. It is one payout window in one jurisdiction, and garnishment enforcement varies wildly by state and by property. But after Tunica, every cage Hawkins walks up to is a data point, and this one went through.
The uncomfortable version of this story is that both things are true at the same time. He is the most accomplished Circuit player in the history of the format and he owes a former backer money from 2019. Poker is one of the few industries where those two facts can coexist for the better part of a decade without either one being resolved.
Say what you want about the paperwork. The man is 26 for 26 in the only column the WSOP actually tracks.
WSOPC Choctaw Mini Main Event final table
- Maurice Hawkins, $76,380
- Brian Green, $50,900
- Will Givens, $35,450
- Ari Engel, $25,170
- Almog Biton, $18,240
- David Emmons, $13,490
- James Misenheimer, $10,180
- Kamlesh Chauhan, $7,860
- Michael Stringer, $6,190
