Jordan “JBanz” Banfield Wins KKLIve Montreal 2025

KKLive Montreal 2025 is now in the books, and it was an intense day of poker at Plaza Universel in Montreal on Saturday. 35 players were coming together as “online meets with offline” for a live Day 2, after battling online during the Day 1 flights.

In many cases, players were seeing each other in person for the very first time, despite playing hundreds or thousands of hands together on KKPoker. In addition to the big Main Event game, there were two other games running alongside.

An hour after the Main kicked off, the $2k Freeroll, open to players who completed the online mission, kicked off, ultimately paying 9 players with a top prize of $700. An hour after that started, the $500 KO Side started as the final event of the day, drawing 61 entries for more than $15k in prizes, not including the bounty pool.

Jordan “JBanz” Banfield Defeats Defending Champ in Main Event

It was quite a battle for the Main Event title at KKLive Montreal 2025. Among the big stacks all day was the defending champ, Andy “thegoose” Goosen, who took down this Montreal Main in 2024 and is one of the names etched forever on the big trophy.

He looked like he was set to do it all over again, going back-to-back, as he worked his way onto the final table. But while he was looking to repeat, across the room, Calgary’s Jordan “JBanz” Banfield, who streams for WPT Global, was amassing one of the biggest stacks in the room.

There were a total of 308 entries across all the online Day 1s, putting the prizes at over $83k and $15.4k up top for the winner. Second place was also guaranteed a five-figure score, and all 35 players coming to Montreal were guaranteed a min-cash of at least $600.

It took about four hours to play down from 35 players to the final table of 9. Katie “AdoraBelle” Marshall was the unfortunate final table bubble in the game when Corey “Muck’em” Chan turned the wheel and rivered the 6-high straight to beat her two pair in a blind-on-blind confrontation. She got $1,520 for 10th place, then quickly hopped into the Side Event as it neared the end of entries, running into the money in 4th for just shy of $2k more.

Once they hit the final table, the action slowed a little, and it was almost 6 more hours before Banfield was hoisting the trophy. Along the way, Chan, who started the final 8 with the big stack, ran into a few coolers to end his run in 4th place.

Banfield and Goosen both quietly picked their spots, using aggression to force players off hands, but also finding folds when they needed to. In one example, 3rd-place finisher Sharath “Sweetchinmusic” Maddur put Banfield to the test early in the FT after Babfield rivered top-top with ace-king. The board was paired with deuces on the flop, and Maddur was in the big blind, with Banfield in position from the button. Maddur shoved the smaller stack to put himself at risk, and, while Banfield covered the shove, it would have been a significant hit to his stack if he lost.

He folded ace-king face up, giving the pot to Maddur, and preserving his stack. Once they got heads-up, it didn’t last long. Thegoose came into HU play with the big stack, but a huge hand early in the final phase changed that in a big way.

After Goosen limped the button, then called Banfield’s 350k raise, the flop came ace-king-three with two hearts. Goosen called a 200k bet to a jack of hearts on the turn, then tank called Banfield’s at-risk shove on the brick five of diamonds river. Banfield showed ace-queen with the queen of hearts, and was way ahead of Goose’s jack-ten. The hand left Goosen on less than 4 big blinds, and the game was over shortly after, leaving thegoose just one spot away from his back-to-back run.

This was Banfield’s sixth live win, adding a KKLive trophy to his WSOP-C ring in his trophy case. The $15k prize will push his live earnings over $130k, with his first recorded live cash coming in 2021.

Place	Player	Prize
1	Jordan “Jbanz” Banfield	$15,400
2	Andy “Thegoose” Goosen	$12,670
3	Sharath “Sweetchinmusic” Maddur	$7,840
4	Corey “Muck’Em” Chan	$5,700
5	Alex “Passive_Menis” Patry	$4,440
6	Michael “Haidomo” Bach	$3,500
7	Ryan “Flushther1Ver4Me” Jensen	$2,770
8	Trevor “🃏Mojoanna🃏” Otterson	$2,200
9	Jake “Gretter99” Ebbett	$1,830

Otterson Wins Side Event; Bourgeois Bags Freeroll, Parlays to 3rd in Side

Alongside the big Main Event action, two other games played out. The $2k Freeroll ran pretty quickly early in the day, with Pierre Luc “rampageee” Bourgeois taking down the top prize of $700. He immediately used most of that to buy into the $500 Side Game, which was still in late registration, and it proved to be a good move, as he parlayed the Freeroll money into a 3rd-place finish for $2,745.

Final Results from the Freeroll

By the time entries closed on the side game, there were 61 entries for about $15.3k in prizes, not including the bounty pool. Trevor “LAS-VEGAS” Delaney took down the big prize after running through most of the game as the big stack. I didn’t have much time to watch any of the action in this one, as I was busy watching the Main Event, and this one finished shortly after the big game.

The final hand saw runner-up Peter Poon shove his short stack with ace-five, only to run into Otterson’s queens. The queens held, and Otterson took down the $5,380 top prize, with 13 bounties to go along with it.

Final Results for the Side Event