Home / Poker News June 2011 / WSOP 2011 - Matt Perrins Pockets Gold
WSOP 2011 - Matt Perrins Pockets Gold
Posted by: James Carter. - Tue, 2011-06-07 10:39
Brits have been doing quite well for the last few years at the
WSOP, and Jake Cody’s win in the $25k NL Holdem heads-up event, which saw some of the best poker players in the world belly up to the tables and in which he defeated Yevgeniy Timoshenko in the final, has pretty much slapped the seal of approval on that decree. Now, Matt Perrins’ win in the $1,500 NL 2-7 Draw Lowball event poured more gas on the fire.
The interesting thing about the situation is that Perrins, like Cody, hails from the Greater Manchester area. Another peculiar thing about it was that Perrins had never played this poker variant – not even online at
PokerStars - until the other day when he won the first ever such event he ever attended.
His lack of knowledge about the game put him in a rather uncomfortable situation during the first day of the event, when he says he didn’t really know what was going on. He kept talking to mates, trying to soak up as much information as humanly possible on the fly.
Lady Luck was lenient with him during those tough times though, and slowly but surely, he began to catch on. By the deeper stages of the tournament, he had identified similarities between Holdem and 2-7 Draw lowball. He says he realized opening pots and being aggressive was the key to taking down many of the pots.
The approach worked so well for the young Brit that by the end of the event he had amassed an impressive collection of scalps: he bounced some of the best lowball players from the game, among them PokerStars’ Jason Mercier, Josh Brikis and Bernard Lee.
The heads-up stage of the tournament had Perrins squaring up against Chris Bjorin, another big name in lowball. Eventually, Perrins prevailed, his half hour investment on a Lowball tutorial successfully turned into a $102k payday and a WSOP bracelet.
Bjorin picked up $63k for his efforts.
