The PokerStars Festival Korea High Roller may be small (for now) but it’s definitely stacked. The ₩4,350,000 buy in super-deep event kicked off just after midday today and so far 23 players have hit the tables.
Among those are the likes of Celina Lin and Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew representing the Team PokerStars contingent, along with 2015 Asia Player of the Year Alan Lau, 2016 APPT Manila champion Linh Tran, and notables Sparrow Cheung, Yuki Ko, Phanlert Sukonthachartnant and Takashi Ogura.
Also registering late was Albert Paik, the Seoul-Main-Event-reigning-champion-sort-of-but-not-really-due-to-the-festival-rebranding. Whichever way you look at it, Paik shipped the Main Event here last year for a little over $100,000.
The sickest part of it all is that the six figure score was Paik’s first-ever live result, and he’s back to the felt again to make another run at a huge payday in Seoul.
With this High Roller starting 500 big blinds deep no one has yet to bust despite playing for more than six hours now. This great value tournament also boasts the popular shot-clock format, where players have 30 seconds to act on decisions, and three time extension chips at their disposal.
Team Pros Lin and Lew seem to be impressed with not only the format but the actual design of the time extension chips themselves. Both of them took to Twitter to share photos of the new chips with their followers.
1st ever @PokerStarsLIVE festival high-roller event in Korea! Have some cool shot clock chips in play too ⏱⏱⏱#PSFKorea pic.twitter.com/WBouJLepI7
— Celina Lin (@CelinaLin) July 20, 2017
Playing the $4,350,000 KRW High Roller at #PSFKorea ! Starting with 50,000 chips. Cool time bank chips for this shot clock tournament! pic.twitter.com/6vS2OdU2I1
— Randy Lew (@nanonoko) July 20, 2017
As for their regular chips, Lin and Lew are both faring well so far with 55,400 and 74,600 respectively from a starting stack of 50,000. Lew’s stack puts him as the current frontrunner and he has a full house to thank for it. Lew held Q♠ J♣ and took down a sizable pot when the board ran out Q-Q-7-J-2 to give the Team Online member the effective nuts.
He and the rest of the high rollers will soon have an hour away from the tables as the 7pm dinner break rolls around. Following that they’ll play another two hours before bagging and tagging at the end of the day. For full live coverage you can tune in to the PokerNews updates right here.
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