WSOP MAIN EVENT COULD HAVE YOUNGEST WINNER IN HISTORY - Author: KatA 

The youngest player at this year’s WSOP final table could break records if he manages to win. At only 21 years old, Joe Cada is one of the youngest players to ever make the finals. And if he pulls off an upset and wins, he’ll be the youngest player in the WSOP’s history to do so. However, while Cada is the youngest player at the table, he’s certainly not the least experienced. At least not according to Cada. He feels certain he’s played as many hands as the older guys he’ll be coming up against: “I may be young, but I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m not going to be intimidated just because I’m the youngest player at the table.” Cada has been playing a long time considering his age. And he’s been successful for a surprisingly long time as well. He managed to pay cash for a house when he was 19 out of his winnings. Growing up in Detroit though, Cada showed no signs of becoming the poker prodigy he is today. He was a typical high school kid, who loved soccer and never particularly excelled at academics. Although he admits that he did love math and logic, which he think greatly helped him when he started playing poker. And when did he start playing? Right around the same time most people started playing online…during the Chris Monemaker craze of 2003. Cada says, "After the Moneymaker thing at the World Series, that's what everyone my age started to do. I played a lot of home games and always seemed to do pretty well. Then I heard that you could play online so I started dabbling in that a little bit." Cada says he started off just breaking even but quickly began to improve. He then began to seriously apply himself to the game, playing whenever he could both online and in home games. He also started driving across the Canadian border to play in tournaments on the weekends. His dedication to the game began to pay off and he began to earn enough money to justify quitting his job at a local restaurant and community college. As Cada became better and better, he became more confident that he’d made the right choice pursuing poker as a profession. He remained sure, even when he hit dry spells, such as the one he had leading up to this year’s WSOP. That particularly nasty losing streak led him to seek backing for the WSOP. Cliff "JohnnyBax" Josephy and Eric "Sheets" Haber, agreed to buy Cada into the WSOP on the condition that they receive half of his winnings. Now that he’s qualified for the final table, you’d think he’d be regretting his backing, but no. According to Cada, he says, “No way. I was running bad at the time and the last thing I wanted to do was drop another 50 or 60 grand at my first World Series. I did what I had to do and it honestly doesn't bother me one bit. They had confidence in me and it's paying off. Good for them." That positive attitude paired with his intense work ethic may just carry Cada farther than people expect at this year’s final table. And Cada say’s he’s ready for whatever comes: "I'm sure there will be some nerves at first, but I'm ready for this. It's not like I'm being asked to go out and try and play in an NBA game for the first time or something. It's poker. I've done this my whole life. I'm going to do what I always do. It's just going to be watched by a lot more people, that's all." Cada enters the final table with 13,215,000 in chips, giving him the fifth biggest stack. While he’ll be thrilled if he manages to pull of the upset and win, he says that he’s just happy that this has now legitimized his life as a poker player.