2007 WSOP Event 25 - No Limit Holdem $2,000

  Whoever first said, "you can't judge a book by its cover" had obviously never been served a steaming plate of haggis. Just looking at the boiled sheep's stomach leaves no doubt in the diner's mind that the prudent course of action would be to push this dish away and go have a King Dong instead. Despite the cliche, most of the time we can look at the cover of a book and come to a fairly accurate conclusion about whether or not opening the first chapter would be a waste of our time. For example, anyone looking at a Corvette for the first time just knows this is an exceptionally fast car. Also anybody who has been shown a picture of Michael Moore can properly come to the conclusion that this man has never had a date in his life. Oh sure there are the occasional surprises, like those skinny little Japanese guys who keep kicking the overweight asses of Americans in hot dog eating contests. Those are few and far between though. At the World Series of Poker it has been our pleasure to see one of those rare surprises manifest itself at Event 25.  Ben Ponzio is a husband, father, likes playing fantasy sports, has probably high fived someone during a football game, and probably drives a mini-van. Just looking at Mr. Ponzio one can envision him somewhere in a cubicle dominated office building asking his co-worker, "Hey, working hard or hardly working?" This is not the sort of person you would look at with fear at a poker table.  There were a lot of people involved in Event 25, most of them with cool hats, sunglasses, nicknames, and really big endorsement contracts. There probably wasn't another player in the room who even glanced in Ben's direction when he sat down to play. Three days later Ben is punting David Hewitt to the scrape heap of well financed, endorsed, and media friendly players who couldn't stand up to against a book that had a very boring cover, and more than a few plot twists in the pages.  Congratulations Ben Ponzio on your first WSOP bracelet.PlacePlayerPrize1Ben Ponzio$599,1092David Hewitt$373,9853Justin Rollo$244,4154Evan Schwartz$164,9075Raymond (Travis) Rice$111,9016Danny Noam$82,4537Adam Ross$61,8408Ken Einiger$45,6449Darryl Ronconi$34,748