By Lisa Yiasemides
Last night’s session was full of excitement. Three new WPT World Online Championship winners were crowned, Day 2 of the Micro Main Event Championship took place and two Second Chance PKO events got out of the starting blocks.
There is a lot to get through, so we might as well get right to it and there seems like no better place to start than by taking a look at the latest title-holders.
Yesterday’s winners
$5,200 Big Game ($1M GTD)
The second and final day of this week’s Big Game took place last night. It was a tough final table, with many seasoned pros among the player list. The result was a five-hour battle before the conclusion was reached.
Exiting first was Bernhard Wladkowski ($20,800) whose elimination allowed Daniel Dvoress, who began with the shortest stack of the nine players, to ladder one spot ($25,000). Daniel Colpoys took $32,500 for 7th and place and William Arruda went one better, taking $42,000 for 6th place. That left five.
Darren Elias (5th) came unstuck next and was joined at the rail by Teun Mulder (4th) and Christian Rudolph (3rd), which signalled the start of the heads-up match between Elio Fox and Team partypoker’s Roberto Romanello.
Elio Fox
Fox came into Day 2 with the chip lead and he converted that advantage into a win. The American, who is playing from Mexico, adds $200,650 to his bankroll, the lion’s share of that enormous $1,000,000 prize pool.
Romanello takes his second runner up result of the series (he previously won $105,117 for finishing second in the $320 Mini 8-Max Championship). The Welshman has plenty to celebrate too, scoring his biggest cash of the series so far, with $146,050 banked last night.
$530 Mini Big Game ($300K GTD)
Ben Warrington, like Fox, began the day as chip leader and that is where he remained at the end. The Brit takes home $54,517 after he defeated João Ferreira Caetano heads up, who adds $38,884 to his wallet after no deal was agreed.
Ben Warrington
Despite Warrington’s finish, there was plenty of shift among the rest of the final ten. At the start of the day, Michel Dattani ($3,840) busted first, despite coming into the final 7th in chips. His departure saw two tables become one and the pay jumps increase with each elimination.
Andrew Wool (9th, $4,620), David Lopez Llacer (8th, $5,474), Pedro Marques (7th, $6,720) and Mathias Siljander (6th, $9,330) all did well but fell outside of the top-five places. Christopher Williams, who had begun the day with the second chip lead left in fifth place, nabbing the first five-figure payout. Alena Yasyukovich had begun the day right at the bottom of the counts but did well to ladder all the way to fourth place. Alexandros Theologis went one better but couldn’t quite make it to the heads-up stage of the tournament, having to settle for third.
$55 Micro Big Game ($100K GTD)
The ‘Micro’ event may have featured the smallest buy-in, but it was chock-full of action when the final day resumed at 8 pm (BST) yesterday evening. The 2,117 total entries had been whittled down to 50 by the end of Day 1. Dan Stancer (50th, $259) hit the rail first and that paved the way for a series of fast-paced eliminations, with everything decided within four and a quarter hours.
The two chip leaders at the start of the day both fared extremely well, finishing in the top four.
Fernando Olímpio had begun in second and they made it all the way to fourth place, while chip leader Thodoris Konstantakopoulos outlasted all but one competitor to take the runner up spot.
Netherlands’ Bas De Laat, who was playing from Malta, was the one to go the distance. He takes the top cash prize, as well as his first WPT title of the series.
Concludes tonight
Event #07: $109 Micro Main Event Championship ($1M GTD)
It’s Tuesday, and that can only mean one thing: It is a Championship final day. This week it is the Micro Main Event Championship, with today the third and final day of the competition. A total of 8,465 starters took part from Days 1a and 1b. Yesterday, Day 2 saw that number shrink from 1,365 all the way down to 56.
Only 61 players needed to go for the bubble to burst, with partypoker’s Carl Froch (1,317th) among those to leave empty-handed. Dennis Bayerlein was the pure bubble boy though, and his exit in 1,305th place meant he just missed out on the $210 min-cash.
Jeff Gross (1,202nd, $215), David Hu (1104th, $225), Renato Nomura (1,029th, $230), Florian Duta (981st, $240), Mohsin Charania (948th, $240) and Yiannis Liperis (943rd, $240) were just a few of the notable names to see a small return on their investment.
With the schedule to play until the end of Level 20, it took seven and a half hours to reach that point. Marcos Felipe Rodrigues (57th) busted right at the end and the Brazilian takes a $1,370 sweetener for his efforts. His elimination means that all remaining 56 players made one more pay jump and are guaranteed to win at least $1,540.
Matt Staples is still in the mix, but the partypoker representative will begin short, finishing in 50th place with 12,782,064 chips, which is worth 12.7 big blinds. Teammate Patrick Leonard (22,226,155) is in slightly better shape but will still be looking to double his 22.2 big blind stack when he returns.
Patrick Leonard
Still, they are in with a shot of that $148,985 top prize, a huge sum to win for a relatively modest buy-in of $109, and that’s what counts. They will have to chase some pretty big stacks to get that far, however, including chip leader Alexandre Andrade (69,992,765), Niko Wieland (66,260,912) and David Carvell (59,162,760).
Play resumes with blinds at 500,000/1,000,000 (125,000 ante) and players will sit down at 7 pm to continue to battle it out. The final two tables will be streamed with cards-up coverage on the WPT Twitch channel, where there will be a one-hour delay. WPT Champion James Dempsey returns to host and will be joined by Maria Ho and partypoker’s Ludo Geilich.
$530 Second Chance PKO ($100K)
All in all, 254 entries were counted in the larger of the two buy-in events. That meant a prize pool of $127,000 is up for grabs, with $10,188 (plus bounties) earmarked for the winner when play resumes at 7:05 pm tonight.
Norbert Szecsi (33rd) was the last player to leave, with the clock paused as soon as 32 players were left. That, incidentally, is the number of places paid, meaning Szecsi bubbled the tournament, his departure locking up at least $657 (plus bounties) for all those who return.
Szecsi joined a number of familiar players at the virtual rail. Manig Loeser busted first and bought back in, only to be eliminated a second time in 208th place. He, like Szecsi, failed to bank any bounties and left empty-handed, a feat also managed by Patrick Leonard, Alexandru Papazian and Niklas Åstedt.
Christian Jeppsson may have only fired one bullet but he still left with nothing, while Alex Foxen busted once but put his second entry to great use, bagging 1,350,330 chips – good for 5th place in the standings – as well as $187 in bounties.
Pedro Madeira (1,488,298 + $437), Jan-Eric Schwippert (1,512,573 + $1,171) and Daniel Smiljkovic (1,997,166 + $898) finish ahead of Foxen but behind runaway chip leader Dmitrii Shutenko who starts with 3,006,948 and $1,421 in cash after eliminating five opponents already.
$109 Mini Second Chance PKO ($75K)
The Mini event also far exceeded its guarantee with $105,500 collected via the 1,055 registrations. As with the Main Event, play paused when 32 players had been reached, but in this case, that was already well inside the money. A total of 132 players won at least $120 for making the cash, plus anything they won via knockouts.
Samuel Roussy-Majeau (11,173,913 + $550) finished with the decisive chip lead, accumulating significantly more than Joao Manuel Goncalves De Brito (7,146,074 + $621) and Frederico Lopes David (7,095,515 + $553), who took second and third spots in the counts.
A host of well-known players had a go and some of them got far too, with Viktor Ustimov (3,865,825), Bertil Andreas Samuelsson (3,361,613 + $243) and Vojtech Susta (2,259,452 + $243), who is currently sat in third place on the Rising Star Leaderboard, all among the top 20 stacks. They have all locked up at least a $236 share of the main prize pool when they return to play blind levels of 30,000/60,000 7,500 ante.
Tonight’s schedule
