The Goliath Main Event of the Coventry leg of Grosvenor Casino’s UK Poker Tour turned out to be a record breaker this week, with 3,394 punters signing up for the GBP 120 buy-in live event.
Making it through to the final table were Ryan Foster, Mark Adam, Neville Price, Arjun Ruparel, Rodrigo Hernandez, Mihaly Jancso, Adam Nice, Phil Stein and Liam Horton, with Foster and Adam (a GBP 2 satellite qualifier) finding themselves in the heads up.
Foster’s massive chip advantage of 65.5 million overwhelmed Adam’s relatively meagre 18.2 million stack to give Forster the victory after a brief but intense heads up.
Foster, who was playing in only his second ever live tournament, took home GBP 62,120, whilst his plucky opponent enjoyed a runner up prize of GBP 40,700.
There was big money at another UK live tourney this week when a UK amateur player surprised everyone by prevailing against a squad of top pros in the Sky Poker UK 6-Max Poker Championship Main Event, held with a guaranteed prize pool of GBP 500,000 on the premises of Dusk Til Dawn in Nottingham.
The buy-in of GBP 1,000 attracted exactly 500 entries to match the guarantee, with a registration list that included big pro names like Sam Trickett, Neil Channing, Jonathan Kalmar, Tom Middleton, Tom Hall and Mathew Frankland.
The field distilled to a final table of Leigh Wiltshire, Abhishek Khaitan, Stephen Devlin, Andy Young, Neil Strike and Paul Haycock, but despite the impressive firepower, it was amateur Leigh Wiltshire – who had qualified on a low-cost satellite – who emerged to fight the heads up with Abhishek Khaitan.
He not only fought it – he won it convincingly to claim the main prize of GBP 110,000, leaving Khaitan with the runner up reward of GBP 70,000.
The GBP 3,000 High Roller event in the Sky tourney was won by Elior Sion, who collected GBP 55,000 for his time and trouble.