Poker Ace result

24-year-old Raul Mestre has won the second PartyPoker.com Late Night Poker Ace, banking $50,000 as a result. The tournament was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK and was the climax of the search for the world’s best amateur.

Mestre, who hails from Valencia, Spain, beat off a whole host of the top amateur poker players to take the title and subsequently qualified for the PartyPoker.com Late Night Poker Masters tournament, where he locked horns with some of the strongest professionals in the game.

Raul studies chemistry in his homeland and was naturally delighted with the win but also acknowledged that his skills were helped along with a little bit of luck which played its part in the mix: “There were two times when I went all-in with just a 50% chance of winning and luckily I won both times. This is the way poker works, it is a game of skill but sometimes you cannot avoid taking risks. Avoiding too many unnecessary risks is the key.”

PartyPoker.com Late Night Poker Ace started with four heats with the top two players from each heat progressing to take their seats in the final. As with the original Late Night Poker Ace, the tournament was open solely to amateur players. To qualify for the televised heats, players had to battle it out in a series of tough online qualification tournaments on PartyPoker.com.

Raul actually came second in his heat to Swede Simon Ehne but a tight final saw the finishing position in the heat reversed, with Raul scooping the first prize and Simon, a student from Huddinge, Sweden finishing second overall.

It was the biggest win the talented Spaniard has had to date and he now plans to play in future live tournaments: “I mainly play cash games, usually with small stakes, with my biggest win to date being around $16,000 in an online tournament. I do intend to play in some more big tournaments in the coming months but will have to see how it goes.”

A spokesman for PartyPoker.com commented, “Raul played an excellent game throughout and also had some interesting duels with Simon Ehne, who he eventually beat into second place. The standard of poker we saw in the tournament was incredibly high and again emphasises the ever decreasing gap between the professional and amateur game.”

“Raul made a huge impact on everybody at the tournament. He made some truly breathtaking plays and clearly has a big future on the circuit. This Raul is not king of the Bernabeu, he’s king of the green baize.”