49-year-old builder bulldozes his way to a career-best win at the hugely successful UKIPT Nottingham
The highly anticipated UKIPT Nottingham main event played out at Dusk Till Dawn over the past week. It attracted an incredible 1,223 players, which meant the £1m guarantee was smashed. The £1,223,000 prize pool created a first prize of £218,300 – not too shabby for a £1k buy-in and enough to tempt in Chris Moneymaker, among other notables, for a packed Day 1c.
The action was fast and furious – and impeccably handled by Rob Yong and his DTD crew. PokerPlayer columnist Ryan Spittles injected more drama on the final table bubble when he got Aces against Terry Carter’s Kings. A King hit the flop but an Ace on the turn was met with raucaus cheers from the rail. Another player claimed to have folded Queens in the same hand.
The chipleader going on to the final table was was the aggressive Willie Elliot, who played Day 3 at 500mph, only slowing down after receiving a one-orbit penalty for exposing his cards. He started the final table in the same vein, using his chip stack to punish any players who had one eye on their stack and another on the huge pay jumps. He quickly doubled his chip count to over 10m without a showdown and looked like he was going to run over the entire table within an hour.
Blow-up!
Unfortunately, he couldn’t take his foot off the pedal and UKIPT Isle of Man winner Duncan McLellan started to chip up. He took three players out to move to the chip lead before a massive hand saw him take a stranglehold on proceedings. Holding a single Ace, McLellan rivered quads, only to see Elliot move all-in with pocket Threes. It was a pretty spectacular blow-up from Elliot.
With over 50% of the chips in play McLellan was now looking good for his second UKIPT title. Trevor Pearson finished in third before McLellan and Angelo Milioto did a deal heads-up. McLellan took a guaranteed £168,372, Milioto took £143,728 and they played it out for £34,000 and the trophy. It was McLellan’s day though and he won when he made a straight over Milioto’s trip Sixes to finish off the fastest table in UKIPT’s history. The slam-bang final table played out over just three hours and 39 minutes, beating Max Silver’s four-hour victory from season 1.
The secret behind McLellan’s victory? ‘I had no fear of going broke’, he said afterwards. ‘You can’t win a tournament without getting your chips over the line.’ Your next chance of putting this into practice at the UKIPT is in Marbella, June 11-15
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