What an action packed weekend it was … again!
With the momentum built from last years Australian Poker Tour in Brisbane, The Gold Coast event was sure to be a smashing success – and we were not dissapointed!
Let’s go back a step for those that have only just heard about this concept, or, are hearing about it now for the first time. The Australian Poker Tour was born from Rob Dzurovski – many of you will know Rob as the owner/operator of “Pokershop.com” based in Newcastle. Rob decided early 2017 that it would be a great idea to bring together all of the leagues to one Poker tour all around Australia with a price point perfect for the Pub regulars, budding Poker amateurs and intermediate/professional players alike – a quick scout around the room I saw a few very familiar faces who would be considered Australian Pro’s and International Poker regulars with very good scores to date. Second event – more traction and attraction!
What other events do you attend that live stream a feature table? We had Tom from LCAPoker once again with the RFID technology table and cards with a 30 minute delay for all those wanting to stay in touch with all of the action. With feature table participants drawn at random via a raffle entry, Tom set up throughout all three flights, Day 2 main event until we had a winner and then moved onto streaming the High Roller event.
But I digress – let’s get back to the game! The games began at 2pm Friday and the carnival of events was completed late Sunday night. A number of champions were crowned and prize money of over $154,000 was awarded over the weekend!
Some pics from around the room
So getting down to the pointy end of the stick, here are a few major results for you!
Main Event – 663 entries – $20,000 1st prize
Your champion – Joe! … Negotiated his way through a massive field to become the main event champion of the Gold Coast event. There was a final table ICM deal done and Joe walked away with the lion share of the cash – he was our chip leader going into the final table, and, from the outer tables it seemed he was the man to beat!
High Roller event – 174 Entries – $10,000 1st prize
With a $220 + $30 buy-in and optional, single re-entry, this was a well supported event Sunday afternoon – with the main event final table playing out in the background players were looking to play down to their own championship very late Sunday night which was actually early hours of Monday morning.
Battle of the Leagues – 319 players – 18 Leagues
$2,550 1st Prize – Player
$1,000 1st Prize – League
A first for any tournament on the circuit! Bring your best players, register your league, and then lets play a standard multi table freeze tournament to determine a winner – THEN – lets do a count back for which teams finished strongest – how many members made it to the pointy end of the game?
Irish Ziggy (Michael O’Reilly) from The Poker P.I. team outlasted them all! When it cam three handed – Michael had to Zig zag around and, ultimately, over the top of two players from NPL Wide Bay – the ultimate winner of the league championship.
With a strong finish by a number of team members the clear victors of the inaugural “Battle of the Leagues” was the team from NPL Wide Bay – congrats guys and girls! From the success of this tournament I have no doubt we will be seeing this on the card at future events!
Other side events which were all well represented included a Teams event, Bounty, Omaha, Rebuy NLH and Freerolls. In addition to pre-scheduled events there were non-stop single table satellites and ‘flips’ for last minute entries into the Main and high roller events. Poker – Poker – Poker!
The Southport sharks venue is a very classy establishment, they took an additional 2000 people through the doors in stride and did not miss a step. From accomodation options, cafe’s, bars, pokies and an events venue that easily held every table, chair and player for all events – well done Sharks – I’m sure we will be back again!
Over 2000 players across the weekend and over $154,000 in prize money takes it’s toll on the unsung heroes – I’ll take this opportunity to ‘shout out’ to the TD’s, they worked from set-up to pack-up with little sleep, the guys and girls did a fantastic job of trying to please all the people all the time (very difficult in small let alone big tourney’s) – I take my fedora off to you all! Well played my friends!
See you on the felt next event – I’ll be the guy with all your chips!
yours in everything Poker
The Prince aka The Poker P.I.
It was a great weekend, and blew my expectations over! The run of play, the player management, the set up, was great! Only the 2nd time wow!!!
The TD guys on the mic, were entertaining and on point, the younger gentlemen was extremely funny,
Great weekend guys
The younger gentleman? Kiwi accent by chance?