Although poker is largely considered to be a Western pastime, it would appear as though other continents are now jumping on the poker bandwagon with Goa, Singapore and now Macau all hosting big buy-in freezeouts.
With its recent focus on tourism and the world of gambling, Macua seemed like the perfect choice, and thus became the third stop on the ever-popular Pokerstars.net APPT (Asia Pacific Poker Tour) which continues to take players to increasingly unique locations.
342 players in all took their seats at the Grand Waldo Hotel and Casino, thus creating an impressive prizepool of in excess of $800,000. Of those 342 were a flurry of big names including Barry Greenstein, John Juanda and Scotty Nguyen.
A sprinkling of more homegrown talent also made the trip, Rick 'Action Man' Trigg, Paul 'Pab' Folytn and David 'booder' Baker all flying the blondepoker.com flag and praying for a big payday. However, although all three had a wonderful time, it wasn't to be their week.
The final table was a sea of eclecticism with a former World Champion (Joe Hachem), a French online whiz and former pro-gamer (Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier) and a sexy pokeress who could turn Kenneth Williams straight (Liz Lieu) all illuminating the dollar signs in the eyes of the PokerStars big wigs.
With the aforementioned only managing 8th, 5th and 7th respectively, the heads up encounter saw Ding Quan Le head into battle against Ivan Tan. Although the final table had lasted in excess of eight hours, the final hand was a simple affair, Tan pushing in with A-T but failing to improve against Le’s Pocket Eights.
Le, a 27-year old Brummie of Vietnamese descent brings $222,640 back to the UK whilst Tan is forced to settle for $129,536.