Home / Poker News December 2009 / PokerStars APPT Grand Final – Day 1A report
PokerStars APPT Grand Final – Day 1A report
Posted by: James Carter. - Tue, 2009-12-01 16:35
For a change, the capitol of Aussie poker has moved from Melbourne to Sydney. This is where the Grand Final of the PokerStars sponsored 2009 Asia Pacific Poker Tour kicked off today. And what a kick-off it was.
PokerStars Pro Joe Hachem was the one who called “Shuffle up and Deal”. Out of the 81 registrants who belied up to the tables on the first of three Day 1 flights, only about 50 survived. Tony Dunst took the chip lead, riding a late surge onto the top of the Day1A provisional leader board.
The day didn’t exactly start under good auspices for the Aussie pro. He lost small pot after small pot and soon he found himself looking up to those who had managed to preserve their 30k chip starting stacks. He managed to turn the tide though and slowly inched back into contention. Winning several small pots, soon he was back among the medium stacks, the danger of elimination a distant memory. That’s when his first double up came around. Jason Gray picked up a couple of Qs and decided to attempt a double up on them. He was called by Dunst who had A,K and the race for tournament lives was on. Dunst managed to catch a K right out of the gate, on the flop though and the turn and the river failed to bail out his opponent. Later, Dunst hit a straight on the turn of a hand in which an opponent had already trusted his tourney life to a two pair. That move boosted Dunst’s stack above the 100k mark for the first time.
Many of the players present at the
poker tournament were
online poker qualifiers from PokerStars. Many of these online qualifiers made it near the top of the leader board too. Dennis Waterman, Alan Brown and Nicholas Owens were some of these folks.
Donna Ciric, something of a poker celebrity down under, thanks to Hachem’s “The Poker Star”, was there at the event too. She had an up and down day, and despite managing to clinch the chip lead one time, she ended up shorter than her initial starting stack, but still alive nonetheless. Everything considered Day 1A was a truly colorful outing: it even had a fistfight between one of the players and a railbird.
