From April 15th-19th, the World Poker Tour (now an Asian brand acquired by Ourgame in 2015) held a sold out event at the NUO Hotel Beijing with 400 entries strong for the invitational Main Event. This was undoubtedly a very special moment for the WPT as it opened its Season XVI in new territory, in Beijing, China’s capital.
This is the second China destination for the brand with Sanya as the first, having held sold out events on the island for the past five years. With WPT’s experience in the region along with their gauge on the market, the recent success of the WPT Beijing will likely see more WPT poker events in this bustling city. The next stop of the tour in Mainland China has already be announced and will take place in ChengDu.
As expected, there were many pros in attendance at the inaugural event, and outlasting them all was Chinese Taipei’s Pete Yen Han Chen who captured the lion share CNY 2,063,454 (US$299,485) first prize out of the CNY 9,600,000 total prize pool (US$1,393,324).
For the young pro, this was a huge milestone. Since emerging into the live tournament scene in 2011, he had many accomplishments to boast of but a major victory had always eluded him. With this win, Chen landed his first six-digit score, he reached a million dollars in live tournament earnings, and coming next year, he will be one of the competitors at the WPT Tournament of Champions with a seat worth US$15,000 packaged into his recent winnings.
Additionally, there were a few other pros that fared quite well; Bryan Huang who parted ways with PokerStars last month, finished in a respectable 6th place; Terry Fan went as deep as 11th place; and Gao Wenling from Team PKC ended in 21st place.
Final Table payouts
1st Pete Yen Han Chen – CNY 2,063,454 (US $299,485)
2nd Chen Ke – CNY 1,373,026 (US $199,278)
3rd Lu Yingqi – CNY 882,619 (US $128,101)
4th Zhang Wenben – CNY 585,468 (US $84,974)
5th Tan Yancheng – CNY 450,616 (US $65,401)
6th Bryan Huang – CNY 373,218 (US $54,168)
Article by Triccia David
Tricia David
Tricia David has long experience as a recreational poker player and has been covering poker events since 2010 for numerous outfits in Asia. She spent one year working part time with Poker Portal Asia then became editor and lead writer for all event coverage of the Philippine Poker Tour (PPT). Under the PPT, she overlooked content for their website, and produced live updates on all their events. In addition, she served as the live and online events website content writer for the Asian Poker Tour. Currently, she does live events reporting in Asia for online news site Somuchpoker and is also one of their news contributors.
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