Asian Teams flying high in $1,000 Tag Team Event as Nikita Luther and Giuseppe Pantaleo take home the gold
The Tag Team event is one of the more unusual events seen at the WSOP each year, with players forming partnerships or groups, and sharing playing duties between them throughout the tournament. This year’s event had a $1,000 buy in, and saw 1,032 teams take part, creating a prize pool of $928,800.
Many star players chose to take part, but as play got down to the final table, many of the bigger names had fallen. Interestingly though, there was still a strong Asian contingent vying for the title, with many Asian teams having already cashed up to that point.
In the top 100 finishers were several Asian teams including Sheng Xie/Li Zhou, Mike Chau/Hung Le, Pete Chen/Victor Chong/Christopher Soyza/Phachara Wongwichit, Yosuke Sekiya/Hiroshi Tamagawa/Yuri Ishida/Eiji Matsumura, Yueqi Zhu/Yue Du and Philip Chiu/Vincent Li/Sparrow Cheung.
A Japanese team consisting of Sho Mori, Hiroki Iwata and Kazuki Ikeuchi remained in contention, along with the duo of Giuseppe Pantaleo and Nikita Luther.
The latter will be will know to many of our readers, as a professional Indian player who is an ambassador for Adda52. Her deep run in this event was not her first of the series either, having also taken 17th place in the $3,000 Big Blind Ante event.
As the number of survivors dwindled, it looked increasingly likely that one of these two teams would win the title, and they eventually reached heads up play. After a twenty-eight hand tussle, the chips eventually went in on a flip, with Luther’s team rivering a two outer to claim the bracelet in dramatic fashion.
This is Nikita Luther’s largest ever cash, splitting $175,805 with her teammate Giuseppe Pantaleo. This is the first ever bracelet for the two players, who have continued a tradition of Asian players faring well in this event, with Indian duo Aditya Sushant and Nipun Java having won this event last year.
The final payouts are as follows:
1st – Nikita Luther/Giuseppe Pantaleo – $175,805
2nd – Hiroki Iwata/Kazuki Ikeuchi/Sho Mori – $108,608
3rd – Manig Loeser/Joelle Parenteau/Daniel Weinand – $76,797
4th – Alex Rocha/Megan Milburn/Joanne Milburn – $55,016
5th – Gabriel Neto/Carlos Caputo – $39,936
6th – Adam Lamphere/Ao Chen/Yijie Zhang – $29,380
7th – Salah Levy/Frank Mariani/Cord Garcia – $21,910
8th – Bon Koo/Bienvenido Caballero – $16,565
9th – Loni Harwood/Haixa Zhang/Kelly Minkin – $12,700
