Fourteen years ago, Jonathan Tamayo met Joe McKeehen at Turning Stone Casino, a location that’s proved a vital forging ground for some of the greatest poker players in the world over the last two decades.
Little could they have known upon that first meeting that both individually would go on to enter poker’s brightest spotlight as a World Series of Poker Main Event champion – McKeehen in 2015, and Tamayo joining him by securing the 2024 WSOP Main Event title on Wednesday night at Horseshoe Las Vegas.
It was a friendship that saw McKeehen and Tamayo as roommates for every WSOP since 2012, sharing a rental car as they played a full slate of tournaments.
“I’m 33. Every year since I turned 21, we’ve roomed together in some capacity, maybe with a couple other people, a couple years by ourselves,” said McKeehen. “But we’ve always been together, just spent years and infinite car rides back and forth, talking about poker, talking about life, and talking about how to navigate the beast that is the World Series.”
On Wednesday, Tamayo survived a wild rollercoaster of a final day that saw both he and Jordan Griff at risk multiple times during their heads-up battle.
After trading the lead multiple times, Tamayo jumped out in front one final time and, holding 8-3 on a 9-8-3 board, managed to hold off Griff’s 9-x on the final hand to secure the oversized WSOP gold bracelet and the $10 million first-place prize.
Tamayo, Griff, and Niklas Astedt started Day 10 of the 2024 WSOP Main Event with virtually even stacks and a lot of depth compared to the blinds. From hand one, Griff and Astedt battled and kicked off a chain of events in which big pots became the norm.
McKeehen spent the entirety of the final table over the last two days sitting on Tamayo’s rail, as part of a support system that helped push Tamayo over the finish line. Having McKeehen and Dominik Nitsche running through scenarios over the last few days put Tamayo in just the right spot and frame of mind to be prepared for those kinds of fireworks.
“That was one of the scenarios that was discussed overnight, what could happen,” said Tamayo. “And we had a game plan for that, if it ended up with them wanting to go to war. It was kind of sit back, watch it happen, and then once your heads up deal with the problem.”
That’s exactly how it played out, with Astedt calling off his tournament with top pair and a gutshot straight against Griff’s flopped set of nines and failing to get there. That set up a heads-up match between Tamayo and Griff with Griff holding a tremendous chip advantage to start.
Tamayo was ready when the pots got big right away. He called Griff down with one pair of aces, and then the battle really began. Each player won a key coinflip to continue their tournament run, and the best hand held during each and every heads-up collision through the very end of the tournament.
Tamayo had his highs and lows, but he was prepared for the moment. From McKeehen’s perspective on the rail, the attention Tamayo and his assembled team on the rail paid was commensurate to the moment at hand.
“One thing I noticed on the final table is it felt like a lot of people didn’t have a support system to tell them like in the middle of the game, how maybe they should adjust their play,” said McKeehen. “During the final table, Jonathan was the only one in the middle of hands getting up from his seat, coming to talk to us, and we’re giving him a lot of additional information that he could use to do what he did.
“I think the game plan that we ended up formulating works very well,” said McKeehen. “The assumptions we made based on our film study worked very well and we kind of just put it all into play.”
Beyond the technical side of things, McKeehen and Tamayo’s assembled rail of friends and family each took a level of responsibility for keeping Tamayo level-headed. BJ Craig, the friend who first introduced Tamayo and McKeehen on that fateful day at Turning Stone, became a willing punching bag and provider of humor and levity throughout the run.
“Being friends with John for 12 years, I know some of his emotional tendencies – what gets him going and what doesn’t,” said McKeehen. “This morning, I was just trying to make him laugh a lot when we weren’t doing when we weren’t doing a lot of studying. I didn’t want him to get in his head or anything.
“I think he was ready to go business-wise, I think the balance we had between study and fun worked out well,” said McKeehen. “BJ, he’s John’s emotional support animal and we made sure to fly him out for this. And when you have a human emotional support animal, the jokes do come pretty easily.”
The results speak for themselves. Tamayo’s WSOP Main Event winner’s banner will be up on the wall next year, about 10 spots down from McKeehen’s. Tamayo was all smiles in his post-victory interview and relished in the fact that he and McKeehen could now team up against the rest of their friends as fellow champions.
“We have a circle of friends that have two Main Event winners now, which you would never, ever think,” said Tamayo. “It’s gonna be kind of fun that we can both make fun of all of our friends at the same time.”
Even when McKeehen is dropping jokes, though, he drops knowledge laced into it. He, Tamayo, and every player in the 10,112-entry field for the 2024 WSOP Main Event knew the impossibility of winning this tournament at the outset, and yet every moment in Tamayo’s career and friendship with McKeehen put Tamayo in just the right mindset to make a victory possible.
“Joe McKeehen told me that this tournament is impossible to win,” said Tamayo. “And then when the field size is bigger, you feel like it’s even more impossible to win. But you just sit down Day 1 and think ‘Eventually, I’m going to bust this tournament. It’s not going to be pretty, I’m not going to feel great. And I’m going to go on with my life.’ And you can mentally prepare yourself for it.
“And I just can’t believe I did not bust the Main Event.”