David Shallow has won the 2012 World Poker Tour Ireland after beating his five opponents at the final table on Sunday 8th January.
Six players normally make up the WPT final tables but due to a double elimination on Saturday the €2,500 buy-in tournament final table commenced with just five.
Shallow took just 3 hours to knock his opponents out of the competition after starting as chip leader with 6.155 million.
The other players at the table were Steve Watts who brought 1.6 million in chips to the table, Patrik Vestlin with 1.1m, Charles Chattha with 835k and Ronan Gilligan with 775k.
He said: “It’s the first WPT I’ve won. It feels good. It didn’t seem that quick to me, but obviously I was playing.”
Shallow hung onto his lead with some difficulty throughout the final table, with a number of risky moves putting his stack in jeopardy. However, the final heads up between himself and Chaz Chattha saw Shallow with a strong chip advantage, holding 7.28m compared with Chattha’s 2.86m.
Shallow played aggressively throughout the heads up and, although losing the lead at one point, he battled back to secure victory.
The winning hand saw Shallow’s pocket Queens beat Chattha’s pocket 9s with the board K-K-2-8-3. Shallow defeated a total of 338 players over 4 days to claim the title and collects €222,280 ($289,032) in prize money, plus a $25,000 ticket to the WPT World Championship.
