Daniel Brits is the latest name on the WPT Champions Cup
The 2013 World Poker Tour has recently finished its stay in South Africa as the Emperors Palace Poker Classic $3,600 Main Event concluded with Daniel Brits winning the trophy and the $132,128 first place prize.
The final table was played out earlier this week and when the action started, Brits had the second largest stack, but significantly behind the chip-leader Eugene Du Plessis. He quickly started building his stack and was in the lead shortly after the day began to cruise to heads-up match against Eugene Du Plessis.
WPT Emperors Palace Poker Classic Final Table
With over 2.6 million chips in front of him, Du Plessis was a clear favorite to win the title while holding almost half of the chips in play. Brits, with a 1.225 million stack was in the best position to try to take the chip leader down, but having pro player Dominik Nitsche at the table and with the third largest stack wouldn’t make it so easy. The bottom players were all in the 300,000 range and it didn’t take long for one of them to be sent to the rails.
In one of the most important hands of the day, all the three short stacks went all-in before the flop. When they showed their hands, Wesley Wiegand was ahead with Ad-Kd, followed by Ronit Chamani with Ah-Jh and Rob Fenner who had Ac-Ts. It looked like a great spot for Wiegand but that changed once a ten came on the flop to give Chamani the lead with a pair. The board ran out with four clubs, improving Fenner’s hand to a nut-flush and giving him over one million chips to work with. Chamani was eliminated and Wiegand was left with just 75,000 chips.
On the next hand, Wiegand got his remaining chips to the middle of the table and Brits called him with A-K. An ace on the flop was enough to eliminate Wiegand in fifth place, who mucked his last hand.
[geocode id=1]After a while, a cooler sent Nitsche to the rail after flopping trip Tens on the flop. The board came T-T-2 and Fenner got the best of it with pocket Deuces. After going all-in and losing the big pot, Nitsche was down to 405,000 chips and was eliminated on the very next hand by Brits.
It took another two hours before Fenner was eliminated from the final table, leaving only two players to battle it out heads up for the trophy, the prize money and the honor of having their name on the WPT Champions Cup.
Heads Up
Going into the heads-up play, Brits had a small chip lead of 3,040,000 to 2,690,000 against Du Plessis but the latter didn’t waste any time before taking a small lead over his opponent after one hour of play. However, Brits managed to chip away and win a big pot by making Di Plessis to fold on an important hand to be up by around 2 million chips.
The process then repeated again as chips continued to exchange hands and it eventually came down to one major hand. Du Plessis started with a 200,000 bet and Brits called. The flop came Qd-7s-2d and Brits check-shoved all-in. Du Plessis made the call and revealed Jd-2d for a mid-pair and a flush draw while Brits had Qs-8d, giving him the top pair. The 9s on the turn didn’t change anything and another black Queen on the turn sealed the deal.