advanced poker play

It’s been a long time coming but suddenly within days of each other ‘Brits’ have won WSOP Gold Bracelets. The first one went to John-Paul Kelly who won the $1500 pot limit Texas Hold ‘em which was event 20 in the series; scooping a very tidy $194,434 along with his gold bracelet.  Then, in event 27 of the series Roland de Wolfe netted $246,616 and a gold bracelet in a $5000 pot limit Omaha High-Low Split.

The first two UK gold bracelets.

 John-Paul Kelly had to fight hard for his win, the initial field had 633 players in it and after 3 days the final table took 5 hours to complete. At the start of the final game Erik Seidel was favorite to win and was looking for his 9^th bracelet and 55^th all-time WSOP cash win. However, he only managed 7^th place and Kelly’s opponent in the final hands was fellow European, from Germany, Marc Tschirch.  At the wire Marc raised to 55,000 only for John-Paul to re-raise to 155,000. The flop gave 8c, 5d and 4s; Tschirsch called and the Qc fell on the turn. John-Paul kept up the pressure moving the betting to 300,000 resulting in Marc going all-in. Needless to say John-Paul called straight away and Tschirch revealed Ah & 5h to Kelly’s As & Qh. All the same Tschirch himself walked away with a £120,000+ second prize.

Three days later, possibly inspired by news of Kelly’s win, Roland de Wolfe took an even bigger money prize at event 27. With a smaller pool of players starting the competition, 198, this wasn’t a small competition itself – with a prize pool of over $900,000. With only one previous significant win on the WSOP tour, in this one game Roland just about doubled his previous winnings in four years of playing on it. As the game drew to a conclusion his last two opponents were Brett Richey and Scott Clements, both of whom he knew were more experienced than he was. After the game Roland attributed his win to simply “keeping a cool head”.

Which nation’s winning WSOP 2009?

So, within the space of one week UK players are now the second highest earners’ of WSOP 2009 gold bracelets, put that way it sounds good – but the reality is that US players have still won 80% of the much prized poker gold bracelets so far this year.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:13 am and is filed under News, features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.