The GG Spotlight – GGPoker World Festival Week 1 in Review
The inaugural GGPoker World Festival has only been running for 3 days (at the time of writing) and already 22 numbered events at 4 separate tiers have run to completion and over $20,000,000 has already been won by a slew of players. That’s $20 Million without counting any of the multitude of side events in just 72 hours. That’s more than $275,000 an hour or over $4,500 per minute. And there are still 34 days to jump in on this action. As much as I would enjoy unpacking and highlighting each and every tournament, mentioning every winner from every event, I am limited in space (technically not but I do have certain guidelines I have to follow) and, quite frankly, it would probably get a bit boring and a lot repetitive.
The CRAZY EIGHTS Asia tournaments kicked off the GGPoker World Festival at 1100UTC as players around the world began to vie for their share of $200 Million and top spots on the 4 leaderboards. The Super High, which played to completion in 6.5 hours, had Matthew Stumpf taking the top spot after a prize pool split with ‘Hazes’ – they both earned around $31,900 each. In the High version of this tournament, it was Brazillian Paul Brombim who took the top spot, defeating ‘Haiyaaaa’ and earning $27,200 in the process. The Medium and Low versions of this event had ‘isellchalk’ winning $12,352 and ‘oggyx8’ winning $3,080 respectively.
Jumping ahead to the first event with a one million dollar guarantee, was Event 05. The Low version of this tournament, with a $5 buy-in for a $60K guarantee, attracted over 14,000 players and created a prize pool of over $70,000. It took nearly 9.5 hours to complete and when it was done, JohnBonGait took the last bounty and earned more than $4,500 for the work. The Medium edition had its $500K guarantee smashed when nearly 13,000 players took up the cause, creating a prize pool of $642K. It was ‘Hunter_Aze’ who finished first in this event, earning $37,105 for the effort, including $12,389.66 in bounties, more than double the second best bounty collector. Nicholas Maimone was the victor in the Super High version of this Bounty Hunters tournament. Earning nearly $100K in prizes, including over $60K in bounties. His dominant play was highlighted by collecting 37% of the total bounties available. Event 05-H: $525 Bounty Hunters HR Main Event, the first tournament of the series with a $1 Million or more guarantee, saw 2,684 players pay the $525 buy-in. After nearly 11 hours, the tournament finally ended with ‘G3ngh1sKhAn’ taking the first place prize and lion’s share of the bounty, earning a total of $116,871.
The next big one on the schedule, and starting just 1 hour after event 05, was event 06. The Super High saw 212 players spend the $10,300 buy-in to 06-S: $10,300 Super MILLION$ High Rollers (2-Day event), creating a $2,120,000 prize pool. David Yan was the eventual winner, earning $428,624 for the victory. The Low, Medium, and High editions of this tournament had 10,624 players, 3,930 players, and 792 players registered for the respective tournaments. Jonas Lauck took down the High version for $110,826,84. The Medium buy-in tournament ended with a deal between 2 Brazillioan,‘PredicTT’, who took first place and $51,241, and ‘RanThisTable’ for $55,853. Over 10,000 players paid to enter the low edition which ended with the Canadian ‘shuffleupagus’ taking down a final table loaded with Brazilians (4 of his 8 opponents hail from there) and earning $13,891.
While that was the last of the big (Million Dollar Guarantee) from the last 3 days – you can see a list of the other winners below – it’s the leaderboard races that have started to get interesting. The Super High Leaderboard only pays the top 8, and the 3 at the top are slowly pulling away, but that’s not much different than saying you’re winning a marathon after the first 100m. Currently leading at this tier is GGPoker Team Champion Niklas Astedt who is less than 20 points ahead of Matthew Stumpf in 2nd, and 47 points ahead of Nicholas Maimone in 3rd.
At the High stakes leaderboard, we again find Nicholas Mainmore, but this time in the lead. In second is ‘WhoBeatsMe’ and Markus Prinz is in third.
In the Medium Leaderboard, another familiar name appears as ‘Hunter_Aze’ (winner of 05-M) leads the field by more than 100 points over the second place player ‘Bashka340’. And finally, on the Low Tier Leaderboard, it’s ‘UFC@Poker’ currently leading the field on the way to the biggest share of the Leaderboard prize.
We still have a few weeks and millions and millions of cash up for grabs. Don’t miss out on the chance to earn your share and be a part of history with the biggest online tournament series ever. And maybe, if you’re good enough, you’ll see your name highlighted in this blog one day.
From the Desk of the Wordsmith