Max Stenberg has won the $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Championship at the 2026 WSOP Online, denying Narcis-Gabriel Nedelcu heads-up to bank $282,125 and the first WSOP bracelet of the Swede's career. The event, staged on GGPoker as Event #18 of the series, drew 327 entrants and built a $1,553,250 prize pool, with the top 45 finishers getting a return on their $5,000 investment. Alongside the money and the gold, Stenberg collected a $30,000 Super Pass into the Super Main Event at the 2026 WSOP Paradise festival.
It is a redemption story of sorts. Stenberg had already come close to a bracelet in Omaha, reaching the final two tables of the €2,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event at the 2025 WSOP Europe festival in Rozvadov before busting in 12th. This time he converted, and he did it from the front.
How the Final Table Played Out
Stenberg arrived at the seven-handed finale as chip leader with 3,904,243 chips, good for 78 big blinds. Nedelcu was breathing down his neck on 3,578,396 (72 big blinds), with Lautaro Guerra third on 3,212,777. Crucially, nobody at the table was desperate: Andreas Freund propped up the counts with 1,151,144 chips and still had 23 big blinds to work with. In a deep-stacked PLO final table, that matters enormously, because the format's implied odds and multiway equity make short-stack shove-or-fold poker far less clean than it is in hold'em.
Israel's Ravid Garbi, second-shortest at the restart, was the first to go, collecting $47,020. Cyprus-based Greek PLO specialist Ioannis Kontonatsios followed in sixth for $63,684. Bjorn Verbakel — a WSOP Europe PLO winner himself, having taken down the €550 event in 2021 — exited fifth for $85,442.
Fourth place went to Lautaro Guerra for $115,177, extending an Omaha résumé that now exceeds $6.2 million in WSOP earnings, almost all of it from Omaha variants. Freund, who had started the day at the bottom of the counts, staged the comeback of the night to reach the final three before falling in third for $155,259.
That set up the heads-up match for the bracelet and the Super Pass. Nedelcu, already a bracelet winner from the $1,500 8-Game event at the 2025 WSOP in Las Vegas, was chasing a second. He had also finished runner-up in the $1,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event earlier in 2026. Instead he fell at the final hurdle once again, consoled by $209,290.
$5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Championship Final Table
| Rank | Player | Country | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Max Stenberg | Sweden | $282,125 |
| 2 | Narcis-Gabriel Nedelcu | Romania | $209,290 |
| 3 | Andreas Freund | Austria | $155,259 |
| 4 | Lautaro Guerra | Mexico | $115,177 |
| 5 | Bjorn Verbakel | Netherlands | $85,442 |
| 6 | Ioannis Kontonatsios | Cyprus | $63,684 |
| 7 | Ravid Garbi | Israel | $47,020 |
Countries as listed in the GGPoker lobby.
Why High Buy-In Online PLO Is the Toughest Field in Poker
A 327-entry field does not sound intimidating next to the tens of thousands who fire the low buy-in events on the same schedule. It is a trap. The money list from this event tells you why: Benjamin Miner, Rodrigo Selouan, Joakim Andersson, Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi and Anton Suarez all cashed, while Espen Myrmo bubbled the final table. Every one of those names is a known quantity. In a $5,000 online Omaha championship, there is no recreational buffer — the casual money that pads a $250 field simply is not present.
That concentration is the defining feature of the high buy-in online PLO ecosystem in 2026. The player pool is small, the same faces recirculate across GGPoker, the Chico network and WPN, and the European sites, and they have all studied the same solver outputs. Hold'em's solver revolution was largely complete by the late 2010s; PLO's has been slower, messier and is still ongoing, which is precisely why the edge for elite specialists remains fat while the edge for casual crossovers has collapsed. When Guerra has banked $6.2 million in WSOP events with Omaha doing nearly all the heavy lifting, that is not luck finding the same person repeatedly — it is a structural skill gap.
Anyone scouting the high stakes end of the online game should read a 327-runner PLO championship as a different animal entirely from a 3,270-runner hold'em event with the same prize pool. The variance profile is worse and the average opponent is far better.
PLO Variance Is Not Hold'em Variance
The number most hold'em players get wrong when they cross over is the size of the swings. In no-limit hold'em, the best starting hand is a huge favourite: aces beat kings roughly 82% of the time preflop. In Pot-Limit Omaha, four-card hands run much closer together. A premium double-suited rundown against aces is often only a modest underdog, and in many all-in spots the favourite is holding something in the 55-60% range rather than 80%.
That compression has two consequences. First, your good spots win less often, so the same edge takes far more hands to realise. Second, because pots get big with four cards in play and multiway action is common, you are putting your stack at risk more frequently for those slimmer margins. A downswing that would be alarming in hold'em is routine in Omaha.
This is exactly where the difference between hold'em and Omaha stops being academic. The same player, playing equally well in both games, should expect a materially rougher ride in PLO — and the most common way that ride ends badly is underfunding it. Standard hold'em tournament guidance of 100 buy-ins is a floor, not a ceiling, for a PLO specialist, and anyone building a bankroll management plan around Omaha should be planning for deeper reserves and longer flat stretches than a hold'em equivalent.
What This Means for Hold'em Players Thinking About Crossing Over
The appeal is obvious. PLO games run looser, pots are bigger, and the recreational player who splashes around in a $50 Omaha event is giving away far more than the same player in hold'em. The games are genuinely softer at the bottom. The problem is that most hold'em players import the wrong instincts.
Three adjustments matter more than anything else. Start by rebuilding your hand-reading around the nuts: in PLO, top pair and even overpairs are frequently drawing thin, and the relevant question is almost always whether you can make or already hold the nut version of a hand. Second, respect blockers and redraws — a made straight with no redraw on a two-tone board is a liability, not a trophy. Third, recalibrate your bet sizing; pot-limit rules cap your leverage, which changes bluffing and pot-control dynamics in ways that hold'em heuristics do not cover. Our Omaha primer is the sensible starting point, and running spots through a poker odds calculator until four-card equities stop surprising you is time well spent.
Practically, the move down is the move to make first. Play low buy-in Omaha tournaments and small cash games for months before you go anywhere near a championship-priced event, and treat the field quality of a $5,000 online PLO championship as a warning label rather than an invitation. Stenberg's $282,125 payday is what the top of that pyramid looks like. The base is a lot wider, and a lot less forgiving, than it appears from the outside.