Rick Mazza

226 knockouts, third-most in the history of this league — that is the first thing to know about Rick Mazza. He has turned them into 12 wins and $5,771 in career prize money.

The trophies came seventeen years apart at opposite ends of an era. He took the Canterberry League Championship in 2013-14, and then the Annual in 2020 — nineteen runners, eight knockouts, over nine hours of poker and $920 for first, the biggest payday of his career. That was the last Annual played before the old league closed its doors.

When the new one opened, he was first through it. January 2021, Eight Deuce #1, fourteen players, six knockouts: Mazza won the inaugural tournament of the whole enterprise. He added #6 that June, then waited thirty-five months for the next one.

He also owns a record nobody puts on a résumé. February 2021, #2: he was gone in forty-one minutes, the fastest exit in Eight Deuce history. He has been out inside the hour a second time since, fifty-one minutes at #46 in June 2025. Not every record is one you want.

His first win came at the fifth tournament he ever entered, Canterberry #4 in September 2008 — an eight-handed field, $80 for first, back when the whole thing was eight guys and a card table. The most recent was #35 in May 2024. Twenty-one trips to heads-up, twelve of them won, and 50 cashes over eighteen years. He has won in the Canterberry Poker League, in Eight Deuce, at the Annual and in the World Series of Parker.