One week ago, the PokerStars Live card room at the City of Dreams was full to bursting with poker superstars. There was ElkY, there was Isaac Haxton, there was Jonathan Duhamel, Greg Merson, Gus Hansen and Shaun Deeb. There were also six German players, who would ultimately dominate things, and there were a whole host of massive high rollers, just happy to be along for the $130,000 ride.
They were all guys who needed no introduction. They were all legends in their fields.
The same poker room today is even more full, at least in terms of volume. But the players here are not necessarily so instantly recognisable: many are just starting out on poker careers, or have found a level of competition more agreeable to the everyday player’s finances. Let’s be honest, $3,300 (the buy in here) is not peanuts, so these guys already represent something of an elite.
But in another way they are the opposite of the players we had here last week. These guys do need some introduction, but will then be worth following closely as the rest of their story unfolds.
Team PokerStars Pro has its two most recognisable stalwarts in the midst: Raymond Wu and Celina Lin. Wu has made a final table on the EPT — he finished seventh in London in 2009 — but does most of his best work in Macau, where he won a Macau Poker Cup event in 2010. He has also won a side event at the PCA and has been on final tables in Australia and the Philippines, but Macau wouldn’t be Macau without Wu in the field, and it’s been more than a year since his last big score here. He’s due.
Lin’s record in Macau is even more glittering than Wu’s. Indeed, anything he can do, she can do better. Lin is still the only player to win two Red Dragon events, the second of which she picked up about a year ago this week. But she has more final tables under her belt than you can shake a stick at, as well as close to $400,000 live tournament cashes.
Even a six-figure amount like that is small fry to Nick Wong, who is rapidly emerging as one of the top players in Asia. During one week in November 2010, Wong won two high roller events in Macau, before defending his title the following year at the APPT. He subsequently bought in to the first ever Super High Roller event hosted by GuangDong in July 2012, and finished third, winning more than $3m US.
Last week, he came back for the second GuangDong Asia Millions and although he whiffed the main event, it didn’t matter so much. He won the warm up, for more than half a million dollars.
Wong has raced into an early chip lead here, with more than 75,000, a three-fold increase on his starting stack.
Liam O’Rourke has already amassed a decent smattering of cashes on the ANZPT, including a second-place finish to Gordon Huntly in Sydney last year. But O’Rourke does most of his best work online, where he is a former Triple Crown winner and regular at the tournament tables.
That’s not all. We have Dinesh Alt, originally from Switzerland, but who won an ANZPT event in Sydney in March. Then there’s Michael Kanaan, who won the same event the year before, and made the final table of the ACOP main event in November last year.
And on the subject of winners, Aaron Lim is also in the field. He won his first World Series bracelet in Melbourne in April, only a month after winning on the APPT in Seoul. He then came second in the high roller event at EPT Berlin, not long after finishing third at the Partouche Poker Tour main event in Cannes. In the past 12 months, Lim has amassed more than $1.2m in tournament cashes and is currently on fire.
Video update
Nicki Pickering of PokerStars.tv caught up with the aforementioned Liam O’Rourke to hear how his early stages have been going:
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. 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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