Poker pro Johnny “The Orient Express” Chan’s attempt to win his 11th career World Series of Poker (WSOP) championship gold bracelet and tie Phil “Poker Brat” Hellmuth Jr. for the all-time lead has fallen short.

Instead, Chan remains tied for second-place on the list with Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson at 10 bracelets won.

Chan was attempting to win 2009 WSOP Event #29, a no-limit Texas hold ‘em heads-up tournament that had a $10,000 buy-in, a prize pool of about $2.4 million, 256 entrants and 32 payouts.

Chan finished tied for fifth in the event.

The tourney was won by Leo Wolpert of Fairfax, Virginia, USA.

Wolpert, a law school student at the University of Virginia Law School, earned his first bracelet and $625,682.

The runnerup in the event was John Duthie of London, England, who snagged $386,636.

Coming in third was Jamin Stokes of Grand Rapids, Colorado, USA, collecting $214,289.

Poker book author Mike “The Mad Genius of Poker” Caro finished in 15th place.

After the victory, Wolpert, 26,? told reporters: “I just finished my first year at the University of Virginia Law School this spring. I have to go back home and check my grades. They are posted up now. I have to see what I got.” ? He also said: “I actually didn’t really expect to win. I mean, I always enter a tournament hoping to win. But with a tough field like this I wasn’t even really thinking about it until today. The goal was to just play against whoever I was going to play and run good against them, see if they had some leaks and try to exploit those. I happened to run really, really good during the entire tournament. Now, here I am. But I am still going to be in law school next year.”

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)