It was an exciting weekend of poker in Japan with PokerMaster Tokyo Cup hosting its Grand Final at Casino Stadium in Shinjuku on December 16 & 17. This event began nearly four months ago with satellites to Day 1 running from September through November all over the country. This month saw a total of 310 day 1 entries with 71 making it through to the Grand Final. Out of that, only 9 of them earned a piece of the 2,000,000 JPY overseas tournament-pass.
Final Table
Once the final table was reached with 9 players in contention everyone was certain to pocket something. The question was who would go the furthest and claim half of the total pie. By the looks of everyone’s stacks, it was anyone’s game.
For eventual winner Iruma, his big stack took the first hard punch by doubling up Kotani with pocket nines over pocket eights. Several orbits later, Iruma made up some of the lost chips. He earned a sizable pot by eliminating Kaneko in 9th place with pocket aces over pocket queens. This would be the only action from the champ until it was down to three-handed.
Three-handed round
As the shortest stack during the three-handed round, Iruma decided to risk it on one of Seki’s shoves and got lucky with his nine-eight improving to a straight to defeat Seki’s set of jacks. Iruma clearly had Seki’s number because not long after, he earned another double up with pocket eights over six-four. This zoomed him into the chip lead where he proceeded to end Seki in 3rd place.
Heads up round
The heads up round started off quite lopsided with Iruma backed by a massive stack. Kue attempted to steal a pot early with a river bet holding a missed flush but Iruma snuffed it out and denied Kue the pot with his two pair. With the blinds climbing Kue’s stack began to dwindle until he moved all in with a mediocre hand of nine-eight offsuit and was sent to the rail by Iruma with ace-jack offsuit.
With the event now concluded, PokerMaster announced it will be back next year with “PokerMaster Japan 2018”, an event entirely for Japanese players.
Payouts (all in Japanese Yen and paid as overseas tournament-pass)
1st Iruma – 1,000,000
2nd Kue – 400,000
3rd Seki – 200,000
4th Tetsu – 150,000
5th Kotani – 100,000
6th Fuusen – 50,000
7th Hide – 40,000
8th Shinobu – 30,000
9th Kaneko – 30,000
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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