Level 9: 1,000/2,000/2,000
Entries: 90/150
The dinner break is over, and the 90 currently remaining players have returned to their seats.
One of them is Steven “Cuz” Buckner. The American is a first-time visitor to the Irish Poker Open, and he’s having a blast. With roughly 200,000 in his stack, he’s entering Level 9 as one of the biggest stacks, and we were lucky enough to have a quick chat with Buckner right before the dinner break. He started off by telling us how he got all his chips, which might be the sickest hand of the 2025 Irish Poker Open so far:
“The Blinds were 300/600/600. I call from the Big Blind with . The flop came . I bet, and this one guy raises to 4,000. I jam, and he snap calls. He had a set of sixes. The turn came , and the river was the . He had quads, I had a straight flush.”
Roughly four years ago, Buckner amped up his poker play, and his many friends in Ireland and the UK have urged him to come to the Irish Poker Open. Now he’s here, and there’s no doubt that “Cuz” knows his way around a deck of cards. In 2022, he finished runner-up in two WPT Events, back to back. In the second one of those, he recorded his biggest cash to date (second in the $10,400 WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic for $690,000).
Buckner is living the dream; he loves poker as a sport, and he’s very grateful for getting the opportunity to travel the world around, seeing new places and gathering new experiences. The other day when he had a day off from the tables, he went to see the Cliffs of Moher.
