PokerStars Championship Macau: Chen continues to crush in Macau High Rollers

If you’re not familiar with James Chen, let me bring you up to speed in five points.

1. Taiwan’s best

Chen is Taiwan’s all-time money winner, having earned almost $1.5 million in his career to date.

2. Cash game grinder

When he’s not in tournaments, Chen is a high stakes cash game grinder who can often be spotted playing the biggest games at the Wynn here in Macau.

3. Back to back

Amazingly, Chen managed to win back-to-back APPT Macau High Roller titles. In 2015 he defeated Makoto Yoshimichi heads up to win $219,850, and then successfully defended that title in 2016, beating Xuming Qi for $293,044.

4. Aussie Millions success

Chen’s biggest career cash came at this year’s Aussie Millions, where he won the $25K Challenge event for $652,909. Despite only having 12 Hendon Mob cashes, Chen has won four tournaments (his other one was an Aussie Millions HORSE event).

5. Chen’s crushing right now

Having final tabled the HK$400K Super High Roller earlier this week (finishing seventh for HK$1,605,560), Chen is back to crushing.

He’s currently the chip leader in the HK$100K High Roller here in Macau, having built a stack of 800,000 at the current blind level (2.5K/5K).

A lot of his chips just came from Martin Kozlov. Chen had opened to 13,000 and Kozlov called out of the small blind. The flop came 8♥ K♦ 6♥ and Kozlov check-called a 16,000 c-bet, before check-calling 46,000 on the 9♦ turn. The river was the A♠ and Kozlov checked a final time. Chen made it 140,000, and the Australian snap-called.

Chen had the goods though. He rolled over the A♥ A♦ for top set, and Kozlov let out a big sigh. He had the 9♥ 9♠ for a turned set, so the river was particularly cruel for him.

Can Chen go all the way and win this High Roller? Five wins out of 13 cashes would be very impressive indeed.

For live updates of this event, head over to our friends at PokerNews.

Jack Stanton is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

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