Espen Jørstad Wins Back $1 Million LUNA Loss in Poker Game

A Norwegian poker player who lost $1 million to LUNA’s collapse in May made it all back — and multiplied that figure by 10 — in a poker tournament on Saturday.

“Surreal experience,” the 34-year-old Espen Jørstad wrote in a Saturday post on Instagram that displayed his $10 million in winnings. He beat Australian player Adrian Attenborough to take first place in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) tournament at Bally’s in Las Vegas, walking away with a jackpot worth 10,000 times more than the $1,000 with which he initially entered.

Jørstad began the tournament by buying into a $1,000 “satellite” game, which allowed him to win a seat in the $10,000 tournament where he won the final jackpot.

He wrote a month earlier that he opted against entering a $25,000 tournament because he was “rekt” when LUNA’s price plummeted to zero in May, saying at the time, “I was going back and forth on if I should hop in the WSOP $25k today or not, but decided to pass in the end. I’ve been wanting to write down some thoughts on what happened in May, so I decided to use this as an opportunity to do exactly that.”

He added:

I think it’s important to take a step back for me, and realize that I can’t take on the same variance as I could a month ago. About a month ago, pre-EPT Monte Carlo, I was on the heater of my life. Everything was going up for about 2-3 years straight, and in a pretty consistent line too. Poker was going great, crypto was mooning and other smaller endeavours were also providing some capital inflow.

This upswing took a pretty brutal turn in early May. The swift and total collapse of the Terra (LUNA) cryptocurrency, and the ecosystem surrounding it, took me by surprise, and I get rekt… hard. At the time of collapse, I had over a million USD in this ecosystem, which was a pretty big chunk of my total net worth. My biggest position was in LUNA itself, but I also had a fair bit of UST, ANC, ASTRO and a few other tokens in the Terra ecosystem. As most of these tokens had lock-up periods ranging from weeks to months, there was no way of exiting my positions as the card house started crumbling, and I ended up losing ~95% of it.

As a result, my net worth is now significantly lower, and I think it’s important for me to not let my ego tell me that I «belong» at these higher stakes tournaments, just because I was playing them a month ago. The reality is that my most sensible course of action is simply to step back, grind it back up, and to not take overly aggressive shots at higher stakes. Both for my bankroll and my mental health. For now I’m just going to enjoy playing the WSOP at a lower buyin range, and sell/swap a decent amount for the higher stuff. Good luck to everyone playing! 🙌

You can watch the moment Jørstad won the WSOP championship in the video above.