Thursday, 28th March 2024 15:22
Home / Uncategorized / APPT7 Macau: The return to the City of Dreams

Good morning everyone and welcome back to Macau, where the dust has just about now settled on the spectacular GuangDong Asia Millions of last week, and Niklas Heinecker’s $4.5m victory.

niklas_heinecker_winner_shot.jpeg

Niklas Heinecker and his big trophy

Today we return to something more familiar. It is season seven of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) and today we begin the HKD $25,000 (US $3,200 approx) main event, with a guarantee of HKD $6,000,000 (US $770,000) in prize money. Even though there are tournaments going on across the world, in Las Vegas and Marbella most notably, we expect that guarantee to be smashed.

The Asian appetite for all gambling matters is well known, and recently there has been a clear shift to this more skilful end of the gaming spectrum. Poker may require a good deal more application than simply banging on the table, praying and squealing either in jubilation or despair, but there are thousands of exponents in these parts keen to test their abilities.

They will certainly get the chance this week. The structure here is a good deal flatter than the hastiness of the GuangDong event (we’ll take a look at that in more depth later) and there have been a number of satellites, both online at PokerStars and here at PokerStars Live at the City of Dreams, bringing players to the tables who are, by definition, already in good form.

There will be a good smattering of Team PokerStars Pros in the mix: Celina Lin, Raymond Wu, Vivian Im and Bryan Huang among them. Each has excellent form in Macau, and we’ll be taking a closer look at the field as it assembles today. We have five days’ play to look forward to: Day 1A is today (Wednesday), Day 1B tomorrow (Thursday) and then days two through five play out over Friday through Sunday, until our winner is crowned.

celina_lin_champion.jpg

Celina Lin, champion in Macau this time last year

You can follow the coverage all on PokerStars Blog. A few recent technical hitches have now been overcome, which means hand-by-hand coverage can be found at the top of the main APPT Macau page, which includes latest chip counts. You can also follow along with the feature posts below that panel.

We’ll have more details on the structure of the day as and when it is known. In the meantime, have a quick click around the site, then join us back here for the start at 3pm local time (3am ET; 8am BST).

Study Poker with Pokerstars Learn, practice with the PokerStars app