American wins WSOP Tbilisi Main Event
The champion of the most expensive tournament in Georgia history is… American Brian Senie ($85,800)… Highroller tournament was won by Steve O’Dwyer himself, one of the top players in the world. The list of those who travelled to Georgia also included: Daniel Cates, Dominik Panka, Konstantin Puchkov, Vitaliy Lunkin, Dzmitry Urbanovich and Peter Eastgate. The latter opened the series.
Debut of World Series of Poker in Tbilisi was a success. The proof of this fact is that guaranteed money were covered almost in every single event! Main Event had 395 entries registered with guaranteed prize fund exceeded by $90,000 making $390,000. The same story with all other events.
All the sevens rings found their owners, many of them just visited Georgia for a brief time. Meanwhile, about the guests. There were lots of good reviews and comments about local people and players. Famous Georgian hospitality and cordiality can’t stop surprising guests. It’s uneasy to get used to it. But we’ll come back to that.
American power
The main trophy came to hands of USA representative Brian Senie. American played final table great, he also gas been one of the chip leaders in the beginning of playing day. Not surprising he won.
This is the biggest win in live tournament for Seni:
Brian Senie – $85,800
Bursan Akimov – $53,021
Giga Avsajanashvili – $38,743
Irakli Papinashvili – $28,776
Anzor Lobzhanidze – $21,692.
The main highroller title also went to an American, to the more famous one. Steve O’Dwyer got mere $31,500 for winning WSOP High Roller.
American defeated Ukrainian Alexander Zhirnov in the heads-up and the latter received $21,000.
The tournament with the most participants was WSOP $330 Adjarabet Championship with almost 700 entries. Prize fund increased to $218,709.
Georgian player Bachana Shengelia took the first place:
- Bachana Shengelia – $43,740 (Georgia)
- Vashe Voskanyan – $26,966 (Armenia)
- Irakli Gavasheli – $19 980 (Georgia)
- Levan Chahua – $14,817 (Georgia)
- Alexandr Kostylev– $11,191 (Russia)
- Dominik Panka – $8,562 (Poland).
Bachana Shengelia
Only blinds on the screen
Other events ended well as well. Of course, there were some sort problems and funny moments. Everyone admired dealers and administration job, but what about info about total buy-ins and prize places on screens?
“Each tournament was the same in respect of annoying players. There is no info about stack sizes and the accurate number of participants! This was especially surprising in Main Event satellites. We were running and counting people, and someone was using calculator to count middle stack size in rebuy tournament. It is the second day of the main event, but we only see blind sizes at the screens,” – writes one of the participants of those events.
Another comment: “…screen problems are epic, people were playing till ITM not knowing how many players are ITM, what is the prize fund, not to mention middle stack – they needed to count it by themselves…”
There were complains about floor stuff unprofessionalism with double standards in their decisions. And here is more:
“…the structure was changing during every tournament. Yesterday in high roller floor stuff asked O’Dwyer about how many players should be put in ITM – 4 or 5, when Steve was chip leader. He told four and we asked to show us formula of ITM and were told that these are WSOP measures and they don’t decide anything here”.
Most of the reviews were positive:
“…there were some mistakes in organization but the series was well above what I expected. Structure, field and the choice of side events were fine (though I don’t play side events), and the main plus is Tbilisi :D”
The first one was a success. So we can expect new starts in the future:
“We (Adjarabet) made an exclusive partnership with WSOP. We most likely won’t stop after a single tour and will offer poker enthusiasts some other events. Maybe outside Tbilisi – we have big plans”.