Edward Sabat(credit: Poker Stars Blog)
Less than a year ago, the Grand Waldo Hotel & Casino in Macau played host to the first NLHE tournament in the People’s Republic of China. The winner of that tournament was a Vietnamese-born player named Dinh Le, who now makes his home in the UK. Now, Poker Stars returns to the region with the biggest event the region has seen. They opened the PokerStars Macau, the first live poker room in the island.
538 players entered the tournament – the biggest ever for an Asian poker tournament. They drove up the prize pool to a whopping $1,620,897 and brought players from around the globe to compete for this record-setting amount. Johnny “The Orient Express” Chan came as did Isabelle “No Mercy” Mercier, Bertrand Grospellier, complete in ‘Joker’ garb, probably due to a lost prop bet of some sort, Vanessa Rousso, Joe Hachem and many others. In total, people from 73 nations made their way to the tournament including about 15% of individuals from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan and Macau.
Wow! This shows that poker is indeed thriving in Asia.
As the final table of the tournament got underway no less than four players from the region remained. Diwei Huang, in Seat 8, had 1,046,000 chips, just a few behind the chip leader, a young American college student by the name of Edward Sabat. Sabat, who qualified online at Poker Stars is no stranger to live action tournament success. He finished third in the World Series of Poker Circuit Main Event at Harrah’s Rincon in San Diego earlier this year (February), earning more than $70,000 for his efforts there.
The players began cautiously and the short stack, So Myung Sim of South Korea hit the rail first, collecting nearly $23,000. Then, it was Javed Abrahams’ turn to sing his swan song. He ran into The “Chuck Truck”, which is what the rest of the table began to call Malaysia’s Charles Chua. Chua’s pocket eights held up against the UK resident’s K,Q in the hole. Abrahams would match his eighth place finish in this event with what he did in the recent WPT Bellagio Cup IV.
Chua would survive the mayhem unleashed by the young American Sabat as he claimed three victims in a row. Chua then stepped in and sent Mikael Rosen to the rail in fourth position. Rosen, the only Swedish player at the final table, received more than $80,000 for lasting as long as he did.
Not to be outdone, Sabat called Diwei Huang’s third all-in preflop shove and flipped over his Ac,Kc. Huang, who once had a nice chip stack, now needed all the help he could get to stay in the event, as he showed his dominated Ah,4h. The flop kept Sabat in the lead as it brought down Jd, 5c, 7d. However, Huang picked up some options to chop when another 7 came on the turn. The ten of clubs on the river ended his tournament and left Sabat and Chua alone to fight it out for the title.
Chua had the chip lead going in with 3.2 million to Sabat’s 2.1 million chips. Unfortunately for Chua, Sabat double up on one of the first few hands of heads-up play. At this point, Sabat had a 4 to 1 chip advantage and he didn’t look back. The final hand came shortly thereafter, and Edward Sabat claimed his first major tournament title.
These are the final results:
1) Edward Sabat - $453,851.28
2) Charles Chua - $291,761.54
3) Bryan Huang - $153,984.62
4) Mikael Rosen - $108,600
5) Jeppe Drivsholm - $81,044.87
6) Will Cheong - $56,730.77
7) Tian Chen - $42,143.59
8) Javed Abrahams - $30,797.44
9) So Myung Sim - $22,692.31
Poker Stars is running qualifiers to the APPT Seoul tournament now. Head on over there today for more information!