Twenty-nine tournaments played, six of them won. Joe Johnson does not turn up often, and when he does the arithmetic gets strange.

It began with the second event he ever entered: the Annual in May 2008, nine players, and he took it down. A year later the Annual again — sixteen runners, six knockouts, nine hours of poker — and he took that one too. Seven years after that, April 2016, twenty players and $955 in prize money for first, the third-biggest first prize in Annual history. Three Annuals, a total only one other player has matched.

Then nothing, for nine years and eight months — the second-longest gap between wins anyone has ever come back from.

The comeback is the part worth replaying. January 2026, twenty runners: Joe wins. February, twenty-one runners — the biggest field and the biggest prize pool Eight Deuce has ever put together, $1,460 on the table — Joe wins, and takes $605 for first, the richest first prize in the history of the regular season. March, nineteen runners: Joe wins again. Three consecutive tournaments. In eighteen seasons of regular-season poker, nobody else has won more than two in a row.

The heads-up record explains a good deal of it. Five times he has taken a tournament to one-on-one, and five times he has finished the job — 5-0, the longest unbeaten heads-up record in the league.

He has $3,695 in career prize money and 15 cashes from those twenty-nine starts: better than one night in two ends with him getting paid, and better than one in five ends with him winning outright. A handful of nights a year, and somebody always goes home early.