Celina Lin is an interested spectator of the final four tables here in Macau, the real-life Team PokerStars Pro peering over the rail as well as out of the advertising screens hanging from the walls. Lin is a legend in these parts: she was the first woman to win a Macau Poker Cup Red Dragon event and then became the only person of either gender to win a second about this time last year.
She has also made more final tables at official Asia Player of the Year ranking events than any other: 19 and counting, including two at this festival this week.
The main event of APPT7 Macau wasn’t one of her best performances. She was eliminated on day one. But there are still three women — Jay Tan, Juicy Li and Mei Ngok — among the final 30 players of the tournament, a result that gives Lin great pride.
“I feel like it’s because of me, that I’m doing my job properly,” Lin said. “The majority of women are still rather shy, but when they see a girl doing well, they think, ‘Well if she can do it, maybe so can I.'”
Vivian Im, the other female member of Team PokerStars Pro Asia, went out today in 39th place, for HK $39,000. Im is a former champion on this tour, winning in Cebu in 2009, and it seems that despite the apparent nervousness, Asian women have had some excellent results at the poker felt. Only about ten entered this tournament, which puts their cash-to-entry ratio at about 40 per cent.
“That rate is amazing,” said Lin, adding that the results are far from coincidence. “They’ve all worked really hard at their game. They study constantly.”
All three players left here have some form as well. Tan is coming off the back of a final table appearance at the Aussie Millions in Melbourne, where her seventh place was worth more than US $150,000. She has had numerous scores in this city too, including a fifth place in a Red Dragon tournament won by Nicky Yin.
Li was at the final table of the APPT event in Seoul this year, won by Aaron Lim, and although Ngok is perhaps best known as a singer in her native Hong Kong, she also has five scores on the tournament tables of Macau to her name.
“I think men play badly against women,” Lin said, who then related a story about how even Phil Ivey showed some cracks in his game when on the same table as Lin and two other women at the Aussie Millions this year. “He took from the guys but gave it all to the girls.”
She continued: “The line females take can be very different…Women are also more likely to stand up for themselves because they feel the men are putting the pressure on them. Because of experience they have with boyfriends or husbands, they also seem to know when men are bluffing.”
Lin had to scurry away to join the high roller event here, where she will be the only woman in the field. Meanwhile Ngok, Li and Tan continue in the main event, with the latter currently one of the two chip leaders. “If she can pick her spots, with her stack she should get to the final table,” Lin said.
And if anyone knows how to get to a final table, it’s Lin.
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Tournament update:
The pink chips, worth 500 apiece, have been raced out of the game, with the red chips, worth 25,000 apiece now introduced. By way of illustration, here were Tomaz Yip’s accumulation of the 500 chips and for each of those racks, he’ll get one — yes one — red chip.
Another notable — if not huge — stack belongs to Hao Tian. It is of the purest gold. Not a single chip of any other colour.
A reminder on how to follow our coverage from Macau. There is hand-by-hand coverage at the top of the main APPT Macau page, which includes chip counts and a list of eliminated players via the “Payouts” tab. Feature coverage will filter in beneath the panel. All the information about the Asia Pacific Poker Tour is on the APPT site, and PokerStars Macau also has its own home.
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