Jason Koon & ‘Mad’ Marvin Rettenmaier Shine at The SHRPO Big Four

Jason Koon and ‘Mad’ Marvin Rettenmaier were amongst the big winners in the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open Big 4 in Florida with $7.5m in guarantees on the tables.

The Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open (SHRPO) Big 4 has become one of the live poker tournament highlights of the year, but the organisers need to get the whiteboard out because the $5,250 Main Event missed the guarantee for the third successive year.

The SHRPO first burst onto the scene in 2013 when Blair Hinkle defeated 2,384 entrants to capture the $1.7m first prize, and the $12m+ kitty easily surpassed the $10m guarantee. However, the Seminole’s lost that profit a year later when they missed the guarantee by $2.5m.

The tribe reacted by cutting the 2015 guarantee in half, but they still had to hand over close to $500,000 in added juice after the players failed to show in the numbers the tribe were foreseeing.