by Mario Alfonsi | Published on Jun 30, 2012 | Updated on Jun 30, 2012Michael Mizrachi made history on Thursday evening, winning the $50,000 Poker Players Championship for the second time. That made Mizrachi the only two-time winner in the short history of the event, as Mizrachi had previously won the tournament in 2010.The Poker Players Championship is often considered the most prestigious tournament at the World Series of Poker, with the obvious exception of the Main Event. The reasons for that reputation are obvious: with the huge fields in the Main Event thanks to the poker boom and the popularity of online poker satellites, most players now realize that there is extremely large amount of luck required to make it to the final table of that tournament, let alone to win the event. Of course, skilled players still have a big advantage – one only needs to look at the nearly completely professional makeup of the final table in the last few years – but for any individual player, you’ll need a lot of luck to even come close to winning.In contrast, the Poker Players Championship annually features a small but stacked field of the world’s best players. For this year’s edition, 108 players turned out, nearly all of them well-known to those who closely follow the poker community. The Poker Players Championship is a more complete test of a player’s poker skills, too, requiring mastery of eight different poker games in order to compete.All of that helps to explain just how impressive Mizrachi’s accomplishment is. In his two wins in the Players Championship, Mizrachi has won just over $3 million, and is one of just eight players ever to make even two final tables in the event. Mizrachi now has his name listed twice on the Chip Reese Memorial Trophy, named after the man who won the first edition of this tournament in 2006.Mizrachi has big plans for the more than $1.4 million he took home for his victory. After winning the tournament, Mizrachi confirmed that he would be using a portion of his winnings to buy into the Big One for One Drop – the $1 million buy-in tournament that begins on Sunday.
