Ismael Bojang

One of many young and talented tournament specialists to come out of Germany in recent years, Ismael Bojang began taking poker seriously around 2008 at the age of 20. Less than a decade later, he’s ran up more than $2,700,000 in live tournament earnings.

Although the majority of Bojang’s winnings today have come from the live circuit, he used the smaller stakes available online as a means to develop a bankroll that he could then use to start playing live. Even though it isn’t his main focus, Ismael has still won hundreds of thousands of dollars playing online as ‘Isidinho’ on PokerStars.

Though Bojang booked his first live tournament cash way back in 2008, it is only in the last five years that his career has picked up the sort of momentum that all MTT grinders wish for. In 2013, the German won his first EPT title in Deauville playing the €10,000 Pot Limit Omaha Championship event. His victory saw him take home $113,205 and beat Finnish high-stakes PLO phenom Joni Jouhkimainen in the heads-up showdown.

The following year, Bojang made two WSOP final tables – both in Omaha events once again. Although he wasn’t able to get the run of luck when he needed it most to claim the gold, his fourth and fifth-place finishes in the $3,000 Omaha Hi/Lo and $10,000 PLO events respectively earned him another heap of money.

After making two more WSOP final tables in 2015 and earning more than $300,000 at this series, he made it three consecutive years of final-table finishes when he got down to the final nine of the 2016 $5,000 NLH event. While he fell short of the gold once again, his fifth-place finish saw the German outlast fellow countryman and poker extraordinaire Fedor Holz and American high roller Thomas Marchese to pick up yet another six-figure payday.

Although that much-desired WSOP bracelet still eludes Bojang, his recent record suggests that it is just a matter of riding out the variance until he wins one. As he explained in a recent interview:

‘The WSOP is very soft and if you learn how to play the mixed-games you’ll have a good cashing rate. If you’re playing Hold’em events you’re always short-stacked . . . you’ll find the biggest edges can be found in mixed-game [deep-stacked] events’.

In 2017, Ismael secured his biggest poker win to date when he finished runner-up at the £2,500 8-Max event at the PartyPoker Millions in Nottingham for $256,423. Now living in Vienna, it appears that his poker career is really on an upwards trajectory – watch this space.