Annette Obrestad hasn’t played a major tournament in about eight years, and she’s proving that she’s still got it in the WSOP Europe Main Event.
With just 85 players remaining from the original 2,617-entry field, the woman who shocked the poker world by winning the 2007 WSOP Europe Main Event at just 18 years old is one of two women left standing.
As fate would have it, the historic back-to-back WSOP Ladies Championship winner, Shiina Okamoto, is the other woman left in the field. Miraculously, they will both start Day 4 at the same table. Everyone has locked up at least €18,000.
Annette Obrestad is back!
After the 2018 WSOP $1,500 Monster Stack, where she finished 293rd for $4,528, Obrestad told reporters she didn’t play a single hand of poker until January of this year.
Obrestad, who had an extremely popular YouTube channel where she did makeup reviews, stopped vlogging for roughly a year. She admitted to having a midlife crisis and went to The Orleans in Las Vegas to play a $150 tournament. Unsurprisingly, she finished 6th for $431 and was back in the mix.
Last month, she officially announced her return to poker and was named a WSOP ambassador for WSOP Europe. Obrestad, who has nearly $4 million in career live tournament earnings, played a few of the Venetian DeepStack Showdown low-stakes events last month to warm up for the series in Prague. She finished 21st out of 412 runners, cashing the $400 tournament for $1,184.
Jeff Platt interviewed Obrestad with a couple of levels left in the day while she was nursing a stack of about 25 big blinds. When asked what’s changed since she was last at the table in a major poker tournament, she noted how the poker world has become more aggressive.
“I’ve definitely noticed a couple of things that I didn’t see on Day 1,” Obrestad said. “More aggression in general, people taking different lines, more 3-betting, and more 4-betting, but at the end of the day it’s still poker, and I feel like I can hang with them.”
Notable WSOP Europe Main Event chip counts
Rokas Asipauskas from Lithuania will come into Day 4 as the chip leader with 150 big blinds, as the players will come back to Level 23 with the blinds at 20,000/40,000 with a 40,000 big blind ante. Players will play six 120-minute levels and take a 60-minute dinner break at the end of Level 26.
Including Annette Obrestad, there are still 12 WSOP bracelet winners remaining in the field. The most notable is seven-time WSOP bracelet winner Josh Arieh, who is currently in 20th place, sitting on 59 big blinds.
Chris “Big Huni” Hunichen is one of the biggest stacks in the field, having bagged 101 big blinds. Meanwhile, 2023 World Series of Poker Main Event runner-up Steven Jones is still in the mix with just over 40 big blinds.
Legendary high-stakes poker pro Eugene Katchalov was the last player to bust before bagging, finishing 86th for €18,000.
Annette Obrestad, meanwhile, will come into today in 65th place with a 26 big blind stack. The other woman in the field, Shiina Okamoto, bagged heaps and will begin with 78 big blinds.
| Rank | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rokas Asipauskas | Lithuania | 6,000,000 | 150 |
| 2 | Giovanni Zanette | South Africa | 5,715,000 | 143 |
| 3 | Werner Lootsma | Netherlands | 5,300,000 | 133 |
| 4 | Jack Loraine | United Kingdom | 5,290,000 | 132 |
| 5 | Johan Espholm | Denmark | 4,315,000 | 108 |
| 6 | Chris Hunichen | United States | 4,050,000 | 101 |
| 7 | Sondre Stormyr | Norway | 4,020,000 | 101 |
| 8 | Roberto Romanello | United Kingdom | 3,830,000 | 96 |
| 9 | Safwane Bahri | France | 3,720,000 | 93 |
| 10 | Sonny Franco | France | 3,680,000 | 92 |
| 15 | Shiina Okamoto | Japan | 3,130,000 | 78 |
| 20 | Josh Arieh | United States | 2,350,000 | 59 |
| 35 | Thomas Eychenne | France | 1,640,000 | 41 |
| 44 | Brandon Sheils | United Kingdom | 1,480,000 | 37 |
| 65 | Annette Obrestad | Norway | 1,025,000 | 26 |