Jamie Gold WSOP Bracelet Brings $65,725 at Auction

2007 WSOP main event winner Jamie Gold's financial difficulties continue to be evident after the completion of an auction for his winner's bracelet for $65,725, none of which went Gold's way.  The auction, which was announced earlier this year and which ran for about two weeks, saw the diamond-encrusted gold bracelet served up by Heritage Auctions and Muvico, the firm in charge of the listing.

Gold has remained non-specific about the events leading up to the bracelet's auction, though he did confirm for CardPlayer in a recent piece that the bracelet was no longer his property.

“It’s a legal issue that I can’t talk about, but what I can say is that I am not selling it," Gold told CardPlayer. "I would never do that. It’s really unfortunate what has been happening. It is out of my hands, but it’s not something I wish was happening. I’m not purposefully selling; I’m not involved in the auction and will not be making $1 if it does end up being sold.”

The bracelet, with seven carats of tiny diamonds and 120 grams (a little more than four ounces) of white and yellow gold, probably went for several times its actual melt value, which was likely in the $10,000 range.  The intricacy and provenance of the piece contributed to its collectibility, though Heritage Auctions has not released the identity of the winning bidder.

Gold's bracelet is the second WSOP main event winner's bracelet to hit the auction blocks in recent months, following the IRS auction of 2008 winner Jerry Yang's similar bracelet earlier this year.  The exact purchase price for Yang's bracelet remains unknown; it was part of a larger lot of precious and valuable jewelry surrendered by Yang in partial satisfaction of his tax lien, which seems to have dated from his 2008 victory.

As for Gold, his latest resurfacing in the news continues his skein of bad publicity, which has dogged him since even before he won his record-setting, $12 million 2007 title.  Gold immediately became embroiled in a legal battle with Bruce Crispin Leyser over promises Gold had made to split potential winnings from Gold's 2007 main event entry, which was originally paid for by Bodog.

Gold subsequently went on to short-lived stints as a sponsored player for both Bodog and Aced.com, a skin on the Merge Network, neither of which worked out.  Despite Gold's fame and his occasional appearances on late-night TV cash games, including a memorable KK-v-AA hand with Sammy Farha, Gold succeeded in generating more negative press than anything else, thus limiting his sponsorship opportunities.  There was a short-lived "Jamie Gold Room" at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, which ran under that name for only a few months in late 2011 and early 2012.