James Obst’s WPT Australia Championship victory had all the hallmarks of a storybook triumph. The 34-year-old from Melbourne tore through the competition to secure a title on Australian soil, hopping on a two-hour northbound flight to attend the event at Star Gold Coast, where he would go on to win AUD $585,359 ($398,488) and the third major live poker title of his career.
Obst is more than 15 years removed from his explosion into the poker consciousness, as a teenage crusher of online poker. Between COVID lockdowns and aspirations towards professional tennis, Obst went more than three-and-a-half years without cashing a live poker tournament, and even then limiting himself to some brief summer stretches.
But when it came down to it, there was seemingly some kind of magnetic pull that drew Obst to the WPT Australia Championship – and it paid off in a tremendous way.
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“Usually I find it quite hard to travel for live poker, just because of some complications with my health and my body that make it quite difficult to stay in good shape when I’m away from home,” said Obst. “I tend not to travel much for tournaments these days for that reason, but when I realized that there was such a big event here and on the Gold Coast, in my home country, the main reason we go is to take a shot at winning a huge prize.
“It just fit into my schedule with tennis quite well, because I was sort of healing an injury, and it was just before a tournament I was going to play. And I also had some friends going up there I wanted to spend time with as well.”
Obst was, at one time, best known by the online poker moniker ‘Andy McLEOD’, tearing up massive tournament fields in his teen years in a time of explosive growth in the poker industry. By 2017 Obst had won his first WSOP bracelet, recorded a 13th-place finish in the 2016 WSOP Main Event, and claimed four PokerStars SCOOP titles atop millions of dollars of total online results.
It was within this window of time in which Obst’s trajectory diverged from that of some of his online poker contemporaries who would go on to make up the core of the high roller scene and WSOP bracelet events each summer. On a grand scale, the Australian government completely shut down online poker in the country in the mid-2010s, cutting it off from the rest of the world.
In Obst’s life, he decided that with a better understanding of some chronic illnesses that had affected him since childhood and proper care in place, he would pursue a long-held dream to pursue professional tennis in his mid-20s.
Obst first reduced his schedule to just a few weeks of play every summer in Las Vegas, along with the occasional one-off stop somewhere in Australia. But he made the most of those limited opportunities. Obst made at least one final table at the WSOP every year from 2014-2018 and then cashed 10 times at the 2019 WSOP. Then, following a cash in a WSOP International Circuit event in November 2019, everything came crashing down.
Isolated in one of the most locked down major metropolitan areas in the world during the COVID pandemic, Obst rarely left home as he missed out on both of his most dearly held pursuits, poker and tennis alike.
“That period was pretty dark for me for quite a while. I mean, it was the same for a lot of people, I’m not unique in that regard. But just before those couple years of lockdowns, I moved into an apartment and so I spent most of that time locked down. I couldn’t get on the tennis court. I couldn’t really do anything. I lost my fitness. It was off the back of my worst year in Vegas, too, and so there was a lot of personal struggle in that.”
By the time a window of opportunity opened up in the summer of 2023, Obst was eager to show what he was still capable of. He made three WSOP final tables in a single summer, including one of his best career results with a fourth-place finish in the $50,000 Poker Players Championship. A second career WSOP bracelet followed at the 2024 WSOP in a $10,000 Seven Card Stud Championship.
“To come back and to run well and to have all these experiences, you can’t put it into words,” said Obst. “It has reawoken my spirit. I feel like I’ve just been super lucky the last couple years, like everything’s gone really well. It’s probably not a feeling that I’m that conditioned to, but I just try to appreciate it for what it is every day.”
Despite No Limit Hold’em representing a small percentage of his best live results, the draw towards the WPT Australia Championship was strong for Obst, especially coming off his second consecutive successful summer. He hadn’t cashed in a tournament on the continent since late 2019, and between the size of the event and a chance to see some old friends, it became a no-brainer.
And all of that came before Obst claimed the chip lead on Day 3 at WPT Australia and rode it all the way to victory.
“So many old friends in the community and I got to see so many of them again, and I’ve really missed that for a long time,” said Obst. “We haven’t had any opportunities in Melbourne for so long to play tournaments here, for obvious reasons with Crown.
“It’s just very uplifting in terms of actually winning the event. I’m pretty aware of just the fact that I was very lucky throughout the week. I’ve given just as much to many different events and taken a lot of punishment, or had some tough moments falling short.”
In playing through the event, Obst also got a dose of something he hadn’t seen for quite some time among a predominantly Australian field – hope and optimism. Despite the lack of online poker access and limited operators putting on major live events in the country, the enthusiasm for poker among Australians continues to persist to a degree at which it’s hard not to feel contagious.
“I was chatting with a friend of mine in Melbourne who was a regular on the scene 10, 15 years ago, and he’s been out of poker for a while,” said Obst. “And he was just astonished at the field sizes and the amount of events that are running, like he could never have imagined that this was possible after online poker got banned.
“Whatever’s happening on the scene has been pretty incredible, and it’s not something I have my finger on the pulse of, but there’s just a lot of passion for the game still and some great organized tournament hosts. I think the future is amazing. I don’t know if we ever get online poker coming back, but I did see that there’s quite a lot of young talent, guys in their 20s and even some 18-year-olds having real success, and I think bringing a lot of new energy and community to the game as well.”
Off the strength of his last two summers in Las Vegas and a WPT title, it would be hard for Obst to ignore the level of success he’s enjoyed in his return to poker. He’s earned himself a seat in the 2024 WPT World Championship as part of his prize package for winning WPT Australia, and the game seems to be pulling Obst back in.
For now, Obst still has his eyes focused elsewhere, at least in the short term. There will come a day, however, when Obst sees himself refocusing his energy towards a game that he’s played for more than half of his life. And when he does, history shows that the outcomes at the poker table will follow soon after.
“I’m committed as I possibly could be with a different direction, and that that direction will come to a close at some point,” said Obst. “I don’t know exactly when it’s going to be. Could be six months. It could be three years. I have to pour most of my energy into that because that’s what drives me at the moment. But I think when that time sort of stops, I imagine that I’m going to be diving back into a lot more poker in the future.
“I do miss grinding every event in Vegas, the full two months, and going as hard as I can. Potentially traveling to other countries and making that work as well. In terms of my level of poker, I feel really good, because for most of my career, I played through bad health and that really impacted the quality of my play and the results I was able to achieve. I always felt like I could do a lot more in the game once I got on top of everything, and so what I’ve been doing with the physical training has coincided with resolutions of long-term health issues.
“And so I think when I do get back into poker, I think I’ll be able to play the best I ever have. And that’s an exciting perspective.”