Four years after finishing fourth place in the 2008 WSOP Main Event, Ylon Schwartz earned his first gold bracelet by winning the 2012 WSOP Event #27 $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. tournament along with $267,081. And while winning this small side event may not earn Schwartz the same amount of attention that his Main Event final table appearance did, he's equally as proud of the bracelet win. 

Schwartz proved this by saying, "I’ve been a professional poker player for a long time and it means a lot to get this. When you’re doing something forever you want to get a feather in your cap, you get to the pinnacle of whatever it is you’re doing, and for a poker player this is it." 

The Chess Master

Long before Ylon Schwartz took the WSOP felt, he was hustling chess games in New York City. The Manhattan native actually made a meager living as a chess hustler for a number of years until he was introduced to poker. It's a good thing he did switch to poker too because Schwartz once said that he considered $100 in profits a big day on the chess tables.

Now Schwartz commonly makes huge scores in poker tournaments - such as the $3,794,974 he earned for finishing fourth in the '08 Main Event. Including his latest $267k cash, the New Yorker now has a total of $4,624,754 in poker winnings.

2012 WSOP Event #27 Final Table

As you can see below, Schwartz's heads-up opponent was four-time WSOP gold bracelet winner David Chiu. The poker legend was hoping to add a fifth bracelet to his resume, but Schwartz stopped him just short of this achievement.