Jim Roberts Wins Borgata Winter Poker Open $600 Deep Stack For $378,391

(Photo: Winterpokeropen.blog.theborgata.com)

The Borgata dusted off its best tournament chips this week for the first event in 2018’s Borgata Winter Poker Open: the $600 Deep Stack. Over four and a half thousand players pitched up to play, so many that the poker room was crammed for six full days to get all the day one flights in.

With the field so large there was $2.3 million in the pot and plenty of pros came sniffing around for a bit of that honey. Mike Dentale, David Jackson and Joey Galazzo were among the players with Alex Bolotin being taken out on the bubble by one of the Borgata’s own ambassadors.

Once the bubble broke and the short stacks started going hard or home day two was brought to a close with just 45 players remaining. Third amongst the big stacks was hometown hero Jim Roberts with $7,400 in tournament winning to his name.

The Final Table

Roberts found himself in dicey territory as day three began to wane. Against all odds he’d made it to the final table, but had done so in 8th place by chipcount with just 6,250,000 of the 113 million or so in play.

His luck turned again when he got his 12 big blinds in pre with aces and held, against queens. With room to breathe now, Roberts continued to hammer away at the table rising in the rankings. By the time the table was down to four he was up to a little over 46 million in chips and the tournament looked to be in the bag.

Borgata ambassador Vinny Pahuja fell in fourth ($137,168) to Eric Eng, who in turn bowed out in third ($166,753) when Roberts called Eng’s semi-bluff with a flush draw and Eng failed to hit. That put Roberts stack over the 86 million mark giving him a comfortable 3-1 lead going into heads up play.

Heads-Up

The end came a few hands after Eng’s elimination. Ryan Hohner moved in over a preflop raise with A-3 offsuit and was snap called by Roberts with A-8. The board came out T-8-6-4-Q with four clubs.

After a brief moment to double check for the flush, Roberts was crowned the winner with a pair of eights. He took home $378,391 for his win. 

Not too bad for someone whose biggest scalp in the past was a $2,440 at a weekly event in Foxwoods.

Final Table Results