He may have gotten the bracelet, but she ended up getting the ring.
At the 2018 World Series of Poker, France’s Julien Martini defeated Washington’s Kate Hoang heads-up in the $1,500 Omaha eight-or-better event to win the $239,771 first-place prize, and also, his opponent’s heart.
Despite battling for four days as competitors, the two poker pros hit it off, and a little more than year later, they are now married.
They’re all in. After meeting two years ago at a WSOP final table when they were heads up for a bracelet, @JulienJRMARTINI and Kate Hoang got married today. Congrats to the newlyweds.https://t.co/ryH3VESHTh pic.twitter.com/9njyPjNB39
— WSOP (@WSOP) September 9, 2019
Martini went on to finish third in the $10,000 razz event for another $134,587 before a runner-up finish in an EPT side event put another $377,910 in his pocket. In January, he finished second in the $25,000 buy-in PokerStars Players Championship for $2,974,000.
Hoang is herself an Omaha eight-or-better specialist. She finished second in the 2016 $3,000 pot-limit version of the event for $182,281, and also final tabled the $10,000 buy-in the next year.
Of course, poker couples battling it out at the tables is nothing new. In 2016, Ivan Luca and Maria Lampropoulos chopped up a Eureka Poker Tour main event together. In April of 2018, Tim Reilly knocked his wife Ness out of a WSOP Circuit main event while both players were already in the money.
Last summer, Kristen Bicknell and Alex Foxen infamously took first and second place in a Venetian DeepStack Championship Poker Series event, and this year, Igor Kurganov eliminated his girlfriend Liv Boeree from the WSOP main event.