When WPT World Poker Finals: Part 3 aired last night at 8pm and 11pm local time on FSN, we were three-handed with amateur Bob Carbone hanging on behind pros Christian Harder and Daniel Santoro. Unfortunately, he would not last very long, doubling up through Harder before running into Santoro’s pocket aces and exiting in third place for $166,271.
When Santoro absorbed Carbone’s chip stack in the aforementioned hand, it gave him an almost 4-1 chip lead over Harder going into heads-up play, a seemingly insurmountable lead. However, what came next was one of the biggest rollercoaster rides a WPT final table has ever seen.
Santoro started out the match playing classic big stack poker, getting involved in every hand and pushing Harder into tough spots and forcing him to make tough decisions to fold his hand. As Harder’s stack dwindled, he started pushing back, doubling up three times in relative succession to go from small stack to chip lead in the span of just a few minutes. Just four hands later, though, the lead went back to Santoro and the eventual champion doubled back though Harder. As the two reached the 200-hand mark, the tournament ended the only way it could have after all of the back and forth, with a coin flip race between Santoro’s AK to Harder’s pocket 10s with Harder’s stack just covered by Santoro’s. Even the final hand had its own drama as Harder led until the final card, which produced a king to give Santoro the victory, $449,910, a seat to the $25,000 WPT World Championships and his name on the WPT Champions Cup.
Here are the full final table results:
1st: Daniel Santoro – $449,910
2nd: Christian Harder – $248,962
3rd: Bob Carbone – $166,271
4th: Steven Brackesy – $129,816
5th: Andy Frankenberger – $99,585
6th: Eli Berg – $83,580
Make sure to tune in next week as World Poker Tour returns to las Vegas for WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic at the Bellagio as we look to crown another WPT Champion.