Seat 4: Mark Newhouse (26,000,000 -- 65 BB)
Some have said his odds of reaching back-to-back final tables was 524,558-1, but that’s just what Mark Newhouse did when he became the first player ever to make the November Nine twice. Most everyone agrees Newhouse’s appearance at the final table ranks as the biggest November Nine storyline especially since he sits third in chips and is primed to improve upon his ninth-place finish in 2013.
Originally from Chapel Hill, NC, Newhouse now splits his time between Los Angeles, CA and Las Vegas, NV playing primarily cash games. A former student at Appalachian State, Newhouse is now a professional poker player who has been playing in the WSOP Main Event every year since 2006. While he’s been successful in 2013 and 2014, it wasn’t always that way; in fact, in his first five years all he managed was a 182nd-place finish in 2011 for $47,107.
Newhouse first came to poker prominence when he earned over $1.5 million for winning the World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open in September 2009, but admitted that he wasn't the smartest person with his money following the big win, as you can see from what he told PokerNews in a Where Are They Now? interview.
"I made a lot of very poor decisions over the next couple of years," Newhouse said. “I have made nearly every mistake you can make in this business and learned from all of them. I am doing my best to do the right things these days and things are going pretty well for me now. The road to rebuilding is a much longer and slower one than the road of destruction, but with a healthy lifestyle, a hard work ethic, a little discipline, and the experience of past mistakes my goals don't seem all that far away.”
Newhouse has clearly rebounded in a big way the last couple of years and now finds himself in the exclusive company of Dan Harrington, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, and Stu Ungar as some of the players who’ve made back-to-back WSOP Main Event final tables.