On the morning of July 16, 2025, Kenny Hallaert sat down at the final table of the WSOP Main Event with four players left and about eight big blinds in front of him. On the first hand of the day he moved all in with ace-queen. Michael Mizrachi woke up in the big blind with king-jack, called, and caught a jack on the turn. Hallaert left the Horseshoe in Las Vegas in fourth place with $3,000,000, the largest score of his career, from a field of 9,735 entries.
It was the second time he had reached the last nine of poker’s biggest tournament. The first came nine years earlier, when he was still best known in Europe as the man who wrote the structure sheets and ran the clock.
The man behind the tournament clock
Hallaert grew up in Belgium and built his career in tournament organization. Before his 2016 run he had worked as a tournament director for the European Poker Tour and for regional series including the Belgian Poker Series, the Belgian Poker Challenge and the French Poker Series, and he ran events at the casinos in Namur and Spa. When the WSOP introduced the 2016 November Nine, it listed his occupation simply as “poker tournament director” and noted that he had run two tournaments, in Denmark and Belgium, during the three-month break before the final table.
That background shaped how he plays. A tournament director spends his working life thinking about blind levels, average stacks and the point at which a field runs out of room to maneuver. Hallaert turned the same habit into a public service: the “SpaceyFCB sheet,” named after his online handle, is a free spreadsheet listing every major Las Vegas summer series, sortable by date, buy-in and casino. Many players who never met him plan their summer around it.
He also had a real playing record before the cameras arrived. He finished fifth in the inaugural WSOP Colossus in 2015, an event built for a huge field at a low buy-in, and by the start of the 2016 Main Event he had 22 WSOP cashes for about $367,000.
2016: sixth in the last November Nine
The 2016 Main Event drew 6,737 players to the Rio. Hallaert, 34 at the time, made the final table fourth in chips with 43,325,000 and sat in seat nine. That year turned out to be the last of the November Nine format, in which the final table paused in July and resumed months later. Play restarted on October 30, and the champion was decided in the first days of November.
Qui Nguyen won the title and $8,005,310. Hallaert finished sixth for $1,464,258. For a tournament director who had spent the autumn running events for other people while waiting for his own final table, the result made him an unusual figure in the game: someone the players knew from the tournament office, now at the feature table.
The years between
Hallaert did not stop running tournaments after 2016, and he did not stop playing them either. He returned to Las Vegas every summer, kept adding WSOP cashes, and kept updating the schedule sheet. By May 2024, according to the announcement of his PokerStars deal, he had more than 100 WSOP cashes and over $3 million in WSOP earnings, with total live tournament winnings just under $5.5 million.
That May 2024 deal was itself built around his double identity. PokerStars signed him as a brand ambassador, wearing the company’s patch at live events, and as an advisor to its live tournament operation. Cedric Billot of PokerStars described him as having “a unique profile of being both a respected player and tournament organizer.” The company runs the European Poker Tour, the same tour Hallaert had worked for as a director.
2025: chip leader late, fourth at the end
The 2025 Main Event, at the Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas, drew 9,735 entries and a prize pool of $90,535,500. It was Hallaert’s 17th Main Event. He led the field with 57 players left at the end of Day 6, and he reached the final table fourth in chips with about 50 big blinds.
This time there was no three-month wait.
The final table started a day after it was set, and the field included Mizrachi, who would go on to win, and Leo Margets of Spain, the first woman to reach a Main Event final table since 1995. Hallaert said that making a second final table felt “surreal.”
Swipe the table
| Place | Player | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael Mizrachi | $10,000,000 |
| 2 | John Wasnock | $6,000,000 |
| 3 | Braxton Dunaway | $4,000,000 |
| 4 | Kenny Hallaert | $3,000,000 |
| 5 | Luka Bojovic | $2,400,000 |
His exit on the first hand of the final day was the kind of all-in a short stack has to take: ace-queen at eight big blinds is a clear shove, and he was ahead when the money went in. If you study tournament spots, it is a useful hand to set beside the theory in big vs short stack strategy: the decision was right, the jack on the turn was not his to control. Mizrachi’s win, which came in the same summer as his fourth Poker Players Championship and earned him a unanimous vote into the Poker Hall of Fame, is covered in more detail in the profile of Michael Mizrachi.
A director’s view of the Main Event
Hallaert’s two runs came under very different rules. In 2016 the final nine had months to study each other and hire coaches. In 2025 they had one day off. In an interview in July 2026 he looked back on both and summed up the experience: “It’s exhausting, it’s tiring, and it’s stressful,” he said, “but it is a hell of a lot of fun.” He also mentioned being recognized at home in Bruges after the 2025 run.
Few people know the inside of a tournament as well. Tournament directors are the people players argue with about a misdeal or a clock call, and the role has its own history of respected names, from Jack McClelland in the Binion’s era to the modern European tour staff Hallaert worked alongside. What makes his story unusual is that he has done both jobs at the top level. The $3 million from 2025 alone came to more than half of everything he had won live up to his PokerStars signing.