The inaugural PokerStars Championship Macau event created plenty of comment this week, taking just 2 hours to reach the heads up….but a further almost 11 hours to reach a winner despite a chop agreement.
The event pulled in a total of 546 players, generating a prize pool worth the equivalent of US$2.6 million.
On reaching the heads up stage, finalists Elliott Smith from Canada and Terry Tang took a 60 minute timeout to agree an equal chop which would see the evenly matched finalists leave HK$300,000 and the trophy on the table.
The duo then embarked upon what turned out to be one of the longest heads up confrontations anyone could remember as two equally skilled and tenacious players repeatedly seized the lead from one another (some observers claim at least ten lead changes took place).
The game could have gone to either one, but in the end it was Elliott who prevailed, sending Tang home with US$ 331,816 as a just reward for an outstanding effort.
The Canadian player boosted his $2 million in live tourney career earnings by $370,508 and gets the respect that goes with such a hard-fought and prestigious trophy.
Other final table cashes included
Daniel Laidlaw – $221,896
Avraham Oziel – $164,749
Aymon Hata – $122,275
Pete Chen – $90,741
Yan Li – $67,058
Xuan Tan – $49,682
Staying with the PokerStars Macau events, New Zealand’s tough women poker pro Sosia Jiang (38) claimed the honours and a $503,100 pay day by taking down the $13,260 buy-in High Roller tournament, besting a field of 180 to secure the biggest cash of her career thus far.
With 138 players and 42 re-entries the prize pool exceeded the guarantee at $2.24 million.
Jiang started the day way down in the chip stacks, but survived on a major double up that enabled her to regain momentum, dominate the final table action and ultimately enter the heads up against Indian ace Raghav Bansal with a massive 8 to 1 chip lead.
Despite a valiant effort and some timely double ups, Bansal was not able to close the gap sufficiently to pose a real threat, and he had to be content with the second placing prize of $339,300. Other final table cashes were:
Troy Quenneville
Canada
$234,000
Nick Petrangelo
USA
$190,450
Ben Lai
Hong Kong
$152,100
Dan Smith
USA
$116,350
Sergey Lebedev
Russia
$84,760
Xixiang Luo
China
$61,100