The first-ever Asia Pacific Poker Tour Queenstown Main Event, sponsored by online poker site PokerStars, has come to a close, and Marcel Schreiner of Germany has taken the title of champion. Following eight hours of grueling final table play and an additional four hours of epic heads-up action against native New Zealander Matt Yates, Schriener combined his A-Q hole cards with an A-Q-A flop to score the winning full house.
Schreiner was an early favorite in the event, earning the top spot on the leaderboard in his Day 1b starting flight and maintaining that lead on Day 2 and Day 3.
That’s not to say the journey was easy. New Zealand’s Alicia Sale actually amassed the biggest starting day chip lead on Day 1c, and Schreiner had to battle through a number of Australian and New Zealander pros before he was able to secure his victory. Some of the more notable local high stakes players at the final table included Tom Grigg, Hugh Cohen and Jonathan Karamalikis. Those players were booted in 6th, 8th and 9th place, respectively, but only after hours of final table action.
Queenstown has never hosted an APPT event in the past, and the overall registrant pool wasn’t quite as large as tournament organizers has expected. Despite these minor flaws, the event was able to generate the biggest prize pool ever offered at a Queenstown live poker tournament. Just under $343k was up for grabs, and Schreiner himself received an impressive $94,300 for his win.
The payout schedule quickly diminished following Schreiner’s $94k and Matt Yates’ $60k scores. John Waterman finished in 3rd place to win just over $35k, while Carl Knox and Daniel Laidlaw received $29k and $24k for their 4th and 5th place finishes. Aside from the aforementioned Grigg, Cohen and Karamalikis, China’s Xiao Dong Xia finished in 7th for $16k.
For someone that has his sexuality questioned almost daily on one poker forum or another, Daniel Negreanu sure dates a lot of beautiful women! Negreanu, who was most recently attached to poker hostess Amanda Leatherman, and has dated other poker players like Evelyn Ng in the past, seems to be keeping his streak of dating mediocre players with amazingly good looks alive, after revealing on QuadJacks that he met his new girlfriend Krisztina Polgár at the 2011 WSOP:
“I met my new girlfriend at the World Series. She plays poker too. She just came up, she was just saying hi, ’cause she knew some friends and stuff. So, we just started, you know, hitting it off, and she’s super cool. She lives in Budapest, Hungary. She was Miss Earth Hungary in 2008. She’s there now, but I’m gonna go visit in a bit. You will like her, Mike. Her name is Krisztina Polgár.”
Negreanu was spotted talking to Polgar in the WSOP bleachers during the Main Event coverage, which was the first hint that he and Leatherman had broken up. For an aging, 5-foot-nothing, 130lb poker player, Negreanu definitely does very well with the ladies –but $14 million in career tournament earnings, and likely a similar number in cash-game winnings and endorsements will do that for you; not to mention he is considered one of the nicest people in poker.
Polgar has one live tournament cash on her resume according to thehendonmob.com, and was apparently taught the game by her ex-boyfriend, poker pro Richard Toth, who is himself a member of Team PokerStars Hungary.
In addition to her poker skills, Polgar was crowned Miss Earth Hungary in 2008, has done a number of modeling shoots, and is a celebrity in Hungary –go Google her pictures and you’ll see why!
From Wednesday August 24th through Friday August 26th, the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT) will attempt to break the UK poker record for the largest live poker tournament –which was at the 2009 Boyle Poker IPO when a total of 1,440 players showed up over the course of the four starting days.
The organizers of the event are expecting in the neighborhood of 1,600 entrants for the GUKPT tournament dubbed “Goliath” featuring a £100 buy-in, 25,000 chip starting stacks, and 40 minute levels. For the monumental undertaking the GUKPT is holding the tournament at the Rich Arena in Coventry, England.
What will likely push the GUKPT Goliath past the Boyle Poker IPO is the multi-entry format the tournament is using. Basically players who have been eliminated on Day 1a can choose to try again on Day 1b and/or Day 1c, and players who fail to survive on Day 1b can throw down another £100 and enter again on Day 1c! Players can enter the tournament as many times as they like but are allowed only one entry per starting day.
In addition to shooting for the UK poker attendance record the GUKPT Goliath also has a charitable angled to it, as £5 from each entry will be donated to the Marie Curie Cancer Care foundation. Should the tournament reach its goal of 1,600 entries the MCCC will stand to receive £8,000.
If you’re considering a Las Vegas casino heist, something romanticized in popular films such as Ocean’s 11, the prison sentence recently doled out to the “Bellagio Bandit” should have you thinking twice.
Anthony Carleo, or the “biker bandit” made headlines after robbing the Suncoast and Bellagio casinos in December 2010 masked by a motorcycle helmet and riding gear. Yesterday, he received his sentence from Clark County Judge Michael Villani.
Villani imposed a sentence of 6 to 16 years on Carleo for the robbery of the Suncoast, which occurred on December 9. Two days prior to his Suncoast sentencing, he received an additional sentence of 3 to 11 years for the robbery of the Bellagio. He’ll also need to pay restitution for all of the money stolen.
Carleo stole nearly $19,000 in cash from the cashier cage at the Suncoast as a live poker tournament was in progress. Paying that sum will seem like a minor chore compared to the restitution owed to the Bellagio, which amounts to roughly $1.5 million. Carleo stole that sum in the form of casino chips, over half of which have yet to be recovered by police authorities.
William Terry, Carleo’s lawyer, presented Judge Villani with plenty of material calling for a more lenient sentence, including character references from George Assad (a Las Vegas Municipal Judge), a Colorado city councilman, a former sheriff from Colorado, and a slew of Carleo’s family members, friends and former teachers. He also related a story of how Carleo was addicted to drugs and gambling following a car accident that got him hooked on pain medication such as Oxycodone.
The plea fell on deaf ears, and Judge Villani ordered Carleo to serve the sentences consecutively instead of concurrently. Although Villani admitted that the character reference letters made Carleo sound like an upstanding citizen, the fact remained that he endangered the patrons and employees of both casinos in the form of armed robbery.
Aug 26 2011
Alicia Sale Takes Lead on Day 1c of APPT Queenstown
written by: Will Comments: Comments Off
The Queenstown stop of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, sponsored by PokerStars.net, was host to its final starting flight yesterday. Despite tournament organizers’ claims that Day 1c would contain the largest competitor field of all three starting days, only 43 players paid their buy-ins. In a fortunate turn of events for the entire tournament roster, seven players failed to show up entirely, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the already sizable prize pool.
As with the first two starting days, Day 1c consisted of six levels of play. A total of 71 players will take to the felt on Day 2, with 20, 28 and 23 coming from Days 1a, 1b and 1c respectively. A number of Day 1c big name pros failed to make the cut, including Joel Dodds, Andrew Scott and Julian Cohen. Leo Boxell, the champion of the APPT Melbourne Main Event in 2011, was eliminated later in the day as well.
The person doing the eliminating was none other than Alicia Sale, a New Zealand native who ended the day’s action at the #1 spot on the overall chip leaderboard. Sale’s chip stack was reduced to just 4,000 before she rebuilt it to nearly 92,000 in dramatic fashion. Sale scored a nut flush on the turn to simultaneously knock out Joshua Juric and Boxell.
The top 10 finishers from Day 1c looked like a who’s-who of local pros, with seven players from New Zealand along with one each from Austria (Octavian Voegele), Australia (Charles Caris) and Estonia (Roland Keiso). The overall top 10 from all three starting flights is hardly more diverse. New Zealanders dominate six of the top seven spots, with Germany’s Marcel Schreiner sneaking into the #6 slot from an excellent performance on Day 1b.
Day 2 kicks off at 12:30 local time. The outright winner of APPT Queenstown will receive just over $94k.
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