Eight Deuce · Tournament #56

Miller Ends a Four-Year Wait

Shawn Miller had not won since March 2022. On Friday he knocked out seven players and made up for lost time.

Four years and three months. That is how long Shawn has been showing up, sitting down, and watching somebody else take it home — his last Eight Deuce win came at #13 in March of 2022. On Friday night he ended it in the loudest way imaginable: seven knockouts out of a nineteen-player field, four and three-quarter hours in the seat, and $580 for the biggest first-place prize of the season so far.

Miller is a charter member of this league, in the field since Eight Deuce #1 in January 2021, and this is only his second Eight Deuce win. Friday was a long time coming, and he did not leave it to chance.

The man who made him earn it was Josh Reel, and what a bounce-back this was after a first-out finish in February. Reel got heads-up with Miller and went toe-to-toe for twelve minutes and thirty-nine seconds before it ended, banking $370.

Third place and $255 went to David Doole, who added two knockouts and made his deepest run of the year. And in fourth for $195, keep this name in your head: Sean Denny. Friday was the fifth Eight Deuce tournament of his career, and he has now cashed in two of them — with two knockouts along the way. Five events in and he is already making final tables against a room full of veterans. That is not luck, that is a player arriving.

Where the money went

The undercard

Lance Cain was the bubble boy in fifth, and he went out fighting with two knockouts — including first-out honors on Justin Vaughn, whose night lasted barely an hour and a half. Andrew Shier took sixth with a pair of his own, Steve Sarbaugh seventh and Juan Lopez eighth after a rebuy, both of them chipping in two knockouts as well. It was that kind of night — everybody got a piece of somebody.

The bigger picture

Six tournaments, and the 2026 season now has its fourth different winner. Joe Johnson still sits on top of the Player of the Year race with 397.80 points, but he managed only fourteenth on Friday, and Andrew has closed to 229.45 in second. With only a player's best eight tournaments counting toward the season, and four more to play before the Annual, this race is a long way from settled.

Four winners now hold Tournament of Champions berths — Joe, Steve McLean, Eric Denny and now Shawn. Six seats remain, and if the season finishes with fewer than ten different champions, the leftovers go to the highest-rated top-ten players still looking for their first win. Andrew, for one, has to be tired of hearing it.

Eight Deuce #56 — Friday, June 19, 2026. 19 entrants and 5 rebuys, four paid from a $1,400 prize pool. Points shown are the Player of the Year standings after six tournaments of the 2026 season.