The 7th WCOOP Event was the first of two Limit Hold’em events of the series. Although it featured only an $100,000 guaranteed prize pool, by the time the tournament began the prize pool was four times that amount, a whopping $400,000! The field featured one of the strongest hold’em players out there, lilholdem954, who is the #1 ranked online tournament player on pocketfives.com. While lilholdem had a strong showing, he fell short of the eventual winner was Cardinal7 who took home just over $60,000.
It took 12 hours to reach the final nine players. Unfortunately for the hopeful amateurs, two strong pro’s still remained, lilholdem and 011180. Here were the chip counts.
Seat 1: TheMasterJ33 (1136618 in chips)
Seat 2: 011180 (253219 in chips)
Seat 3: Itchy (956871 in chips)
Seat 4: Cardinal7 (673710 in chips)
Seat 5: cfinnn (704680 in chips)
Seat 6: superbrono (545844 in chips)
Seat 7: PapaPapsilon (475999 in chips)
Seat 8: Nirvana76 (398160 in chips)
Seat 9: lilholdem954 (1031899 in chips)
Lilholdem was clearly the most dangerous player at the table. With over a million chips, it looked like the famed pro may pull out his first bracelet. On the other hand, while 011180 was one of the more skilled players at the table, he was also the shortest stack.
However, Nirvana76 was the first to go out. He eventually got all in on a K high flop with KJ against Cardinal7’s pocket queens. Unfortunately, a queen came on the turn, leaving Nirvana drawing dead and out in 9th place. Lilholdem’s day was almost done as well. After giving most of his chips away on a tough hand, he found himself all in with a pair of aces versus a pair of aces with a weaker kicker. However, his opponent also had a flush draw, which spiked on the river leaving Lil in 5th place for nearly $20,000.
With two professionals out of the way, the road was paved for amateur Cardinal7 to take his first WCOOP bracelet. Him and TheMasterJ33 chopped when it came down to heads up, but Cardinal defeated the once chip leader, scoring $67,933.49. Congratulations to Cardinal7! Here were the payouts.
1 Cardinal7 United States $67,933.49
2 TheMasterJ33 United States $53,629.87
3 PapaPapsilon Germany $28,990.72
4 superbrono Slovenia $23,472.60
5 lilholdem954 United States $18,407.46
6 Itchy United States $13,877.66
7 011180 United States $9,759.66
8 cfinnn Canada $6,053.46
9 Nirvana76 Netherlands $3,623.84