Simon Tolly is your PPUK Tour Champ!
The first season of the inaugural PokerPlayer UK Tour had undoubtedly surpassed all expectations. But its legacy would be incomplete without a dramatic finish in the shape of the £165 Grand Final in Birmingham. With a 10,000 starting stack and a prizepool of over £20k, the stage was set and the cards hit the felt promptly at 1pm.
From the outset, all eyes were on four particularly familiar faces, Ben Pennick, Brenda Sheerins, Gary Hill, Alan Dean. The individual leg champions were scattered across the floor and all competing to see who could become the tour’s first ever double champion.
Winners’ Circle
Four hours in, and with Sheerins on the rail, the three remaining winners were hanging in there but the same couldn’t be said for a huge swathe of the field. In a frenzied period of aggression, over 40% of the tables had lost their players.
With the blinds and antes quickly rising to painful levels and so much on the line, there was certainly no room for nervousness and it wasn’t long before Pennick’s stack was swallowed up. At almost exactly the same time, Dean’s Grand Final journey came to an end, leaving just Leeds champ Gary Hills flying the flag.
Down to 38 players, Hills was still in, but the rocky style which had worked so well back in July wasn’t reaping the same rewards. After nursing the short stack heroically for a few rounds, he bowed out.
As play hurtled towards the final table, the chatty and enigmatically named N. Ali was wielding a decent stack as was the slickly dressed Mahmoud Abdelkader. Both men were able to easily book their seats in the final ten but both were still some way behind chipleader Simon Tolly.
Big Finish
Tolly had almost a 100,000 chip advantage over second-placed Noel Farrell and as the final table kicked off in the snazzy high-stakes room Tolly’s lead only grew as he seemed to make all the right moves at the right time. But several skirmishes with Farrell left Tolly shaking his head and wondering how he had become the short stack. Then, in a of a lightning turnaround of fortunes, one huge double-up through Farrell followed by another through Abdelkader sent Tolly’s stack from molehill to mountain in minutes.
Inevitably, Tolly and Farrell found themselves heads-up, and when a shellshocked Farrell stuck it all in with K-9 offsuit only to run into Tolly’s powerhouse A-K that was that for our first ever live tour.
Congratulations to Tolly and to everyone who played in this year’s series. We hope you had a much fun as we did. See you next year!
Here’s how the Grand Final finished:
Buy-in: £150
Entries: 135 runners
Prizepool: £20,250
1. Simon Tolly £6,900
2. Noel Farrell £3,990
3. Mahmoud Abdelkader £2,490
4. John Hicks £1,660
5. Ed Killworth £1,280
6. Brian Donkin £890
7. Dave Andrews £690
8. N Ali £490
9. Peter Ryder £400
10. Tom Richards £340
11. Steven Maskell £280
12. Andrew Humpage £280
13. R Paluch £280
14. Shirley Cole £280
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