Macau Red Dragon Closing in on the Final Table

Macau Poker Cup has returned to Hong Kong for its 22nd edition with number of events, the most prominent one being the Red Dragon tournament. Featuring a buy-in of HK$12,000 ($1,700), the organizers from PokerStars were hoping to see the last year's record of 995 unique entries shattered.

They came close, but the record remained intact, as the registration closed at 987 players. Close, but no cigar, as the saying goes. Still, these 987 players created a prize pool of HK$10,339,812, which is around $1.3 million. Lion’s share of that, namely $293,000 will be claimed by the winner tomorrow.

The bubble, which was set at 117 players, burst during the last level of play during the Day 2. The hand for hand stage started when there were 120 left and the first two players were sent off fairly quickly. It seemed like it would be a simple matter, but it was a wrong assumption to make.

It took total of 90 minutes for the bubble boy to be found. The tournament staff was almost ready to give up and call it a day when they announced the last hand for the day. Nobody was holding their breath given how the action has gone up to that point, but poker gods decided to finally put an end on the charade.

The field was reduced by not one but two players after that last hand was over and Zhiyun Tang and Dapeng Wu split the cash, with everybody else leaving for the day guaranteed to make the money.

Those remaining 166 returned today to play down to the final table, led by Korean Yiwon Lee with the stack of nearly 600k in chips. At the moment of writing this, that field has been reduced to sixteen players and although Yiwon Lee has lost the chip lead, he’s still in with a comfortable stack.

The play today should stop once the final table is reached and the final nine will come back to battle it out for the first prize of $293,000 and (almost) more importantly the awesome Red Dragon trophy that every living and breathing person, poker player or not, would love to have on their shelf!

Photo: mbp