Poker

Tryba, Koral earn six-figure wins

Sure, there's a "Big Event" going on in Los Angeles as well as the WSOP Circuit in Atlantic City, but quietly, two other events stole the show and offered up some good money to their champions.

There's little debate about the power of a solid poker tournament in the Chicago area. When the WSOP Circuit stopped by for a full slate of events, as well as the Regional Championship, the poker room was filled. Sure, the $10,000 event attracted some of the bigger names in the game as not only a ton of cash was on the line, but some additional television exposure. The $1,500 event didn't offer the same sort of mainstream coverage, but 872 players entered to make it the largest WSOP Circuit tournament in history.

Clearly, there is a strong poker market in the Midwest and the Chicago Poker Classic, an 11-event series held at the Horseshoe Casino offered players in the region a local way to play for a lot of money. Buy-ins ranged from $240 to the $3,125 main event. The first $240 event offered a field of 1,206 players to award Jill Bryant the $48,795 payday as she defeated Scott Levine heads-up. That's a nice ROI (but not as nice as the ones from the Sunday Million). The $1,100 heads-up event even brought in 238 entries and gave James Snyder the top prize of $69,618. To put things in perspective, slightly, the $3,000 heads-up event at the Bicycle Casino's Big Event 2011, had a cap of 64 players and only 23 entered! The Horseshoe wanted to accomodate to make their fields as big as possible and they succeeded quite easily.

The main event had 304 players to create a prize pool of $944,640. Established poker pro Tom Koral won the event and $226,708 to push his live earnings over $1 million. Koral made the final table at the 2010 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (eighth) and has 15 WSOP cashes. Online, he's an FTOPS champion and barely missed out on becoming a SCOOP champion last year in the $2,100 no-limit hold 'em event. Paul Bianchi also made the final table and finished third for $92,339. This was his third final table at the Chicago Poker Classic. Levine finished fourth to earn $64,642 and notch his second final table of the series.

I think the bottom line is that there needs to be more events in the area. They've proven to be successful and with these types of turnouts, you can expect that future events will draw more players who will try and grab the bigger prize pools.

Borgata's $500,000 Guarantee

The Borgata, hoping to take advantage of the players in town for the WSOP Circuit events just down the road at Caesars Atlantic City, offered a $500,000 guaranteed prize pool for $1,650 buy-in. Typically the Borgata hits their guarantees in their major events with ease, but fell just short this time around. Three hundred and eight players turned out and Chris "indariva" Tryba emerged from less than a three-hour final table with the title and according to the Borgata's official results, $131,257.

Tryba has traveled along the WSOP Circuit for the last year with hopes of making it into the National Championship. After a sixth-place finish in a WSOPC event last week, Tryba headed to the Borgata for this event and the second-biggest live score of his career. According to the leaderboard on wsop.com, he is currently a few spots out of the National Championship, but the leaderboard doesn't reflect his latest WSOP-C cash, his ninth of the season.

Tryba was keeping his followers up to date on Twitter throughout the entire tournament. After the final table, spoken like a true online grinder, Tryba said, "Weeeeeeeeeeeee 6 figure scores r fun :)"

Here are the final table results:

1. Christopher Tryba ($131,257)
2. Seungwhan Lee ($72,921)
3. Jay Shumsey ($45,211)
4. Joshua Supsak ($36,461)
5. Eracles Panayiotou ($28,196)
6. Jinhing Chin ($23,821)
7. John Andress ($19,203)
8. John Zoldak ($14,341)

The Big Event

Players are in the money at the NAPT Los Angeles … I mean the Big Event. Victor Ramdin held a massive chip lead heading into Day 3 and play on Tuesday started in the same fashion. With just over 50 players left, Ramdin held a 1.1 million-chip stack while his closest opponent, Chris DiMaci only held 630,000. Ramdin might have an edge for now, but Daniel Negreanu, Pat Pezzin, Shawn Busse, Greg DeBora, David Peters, Ali Eslami, Joseph Hachem and David "The Original" Baker remain which will make for some interesting dynamics.

As the field chases the top prize of $500,000, all players locked up at least $7,500. The main event concludes on Thursday which is when the $10,000 Bounty Shootout begins. Players must be registered by the end of the day as the draw for tables will take place on Wednesday. There is a cap of 81 players for this event and as of 5 p.m. ET, PokerNews' Eric Ramsey reported there were only seven seats left.

Small blinds: Tom Dwan and Daniel Cates got a few "Durrrr Challenge" hands in before Dwan needed to cut the action short. The two are set to resume action in the coming days. … There's an app on iTunes called Poker Buddies where players can challenge friends to heads-up matches. Win matches and earn points that you can cash in for prizes. The app is currently among the top 25 apps on iTunes. … Sunday Million champion Luke Vrabel spoke to the PokerStarsBlog about the chop I questioned in yesterday's blog. He said, "… it was far more important to me to secure myself financially for the future than to try and be a hero and gamble in such a fast structure for millions of dollars." Well said. More here.