Well, it only took 53 long and gruelling events, but we finally did it, Britain at last has a WSOP 2007 gold bracelet winner to be proud of in Hendon’s Ram Vaswani.After 13 career cashes since 2002, ‘Crazy Horse’ Vaswani came up trumps in the $1,500 Limit Event Shootout, thereby becoming the first member of the illustrious Hendon Mob crew to take top honours, Ross and Barny Boatman and Joe Beevers all cashing on numerous occasions, but without ever quite getting their hands on the gold.
Regarded as one of Europe’s finest No Limit Hold’Em players, it was thus surprising to see Ram break his duck in a Limit event, but triumph he did, defeating an eclectic final table that included Norwegian Sondre Sagstuen and fellow Londoner Andy Ward, who eventually finished second for $124,816.
Also cashing in this 8-handed Shootout was London’s Nick Goodall, who backed up his Monte Carlo cash with another strong performance here, and a host of PokerStars representatives in Annand Ramdin, Noah Boeken, Isabelle Mercier and William Chen, who all took home just over 6k in spondoolies.
Incredibly, this was only the third Event to finish within two days, many of the scheduled 2 day Events being forced into a third day due to the impressive numbers playing at this year’s World Series. However, even with 720 players and a near 2 million prize pool, Ram managed to tie things up in the very early hours of Thursday morning, his Kh-Qs on an all heart board seeing him win in style.Now residing in Finchley, the 37-year old is a complete gambler at heart yet retains an image of control and authority whilst at the table and a polite and friendly demeanour when not. When he was younger, he was an aspiring snooker player but gave it up to concentrate on poker, a good decision as it turned out. Now the Hendon Mobber can add a WSOP bracelet (and the $217,438 first prize) to his ever-increasing list of achievements. A true poker legend.