2016 Rock ‘n’ Roll Poker Open
Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino
Hollywood, FL
Event 1: $360 Deep Stack No Limit Hold’em (Re-Entry)
Entries: 5,018
Prize Pool: $1,505,400
November 16-21, 2016
(Hollywood, FL) — Rafael Reis is the champion of Event 1 at the 2016 Rock ‘n’ Roll Poker Open, outlasting an enormous field to win the top prize in a nine-way deal at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollwood. Reis, who was the commanding chip leader at the time of the chop, collected $155,642 and the second blue guitar pick trophy of his career.
“Enormous” might be a bit of an understatement for the record-setting field that came out for the series opener. This $360 re-entry attracted 5,018 total entries, setting a new high-water mark for a tournament field in the state of Florida. The previous record was set earlier this year at the Lucky Hearts Poker Open (4,075 entries), but this event smashed that attendance figure by nearly 1,000 entries and saw its prize pool top $1,500,000.
Reis is a 34-year-old professional poker player and entrepreneur originally from Curitiba, Brazil. He now makes his home in Kent, Washington, where he’s married and has two young children. Despite his geography and his commitments to family, he’s a frequent patron of the Seminole Hard Rock, a property in which he has found considerable success.
These huge-field events seem to suit Reis’ playing style perfectly. Two Rock ‘n’ Roll Poker Opens ago (2014), he won more than $90,000 and his first Seminole Hard Rock Poker trophy after topping a field of 1,250 entries in a $570 event. In April of last year, he finished sixth in another huge $570 re-entry (2,474 entries), earning a similar payout and what was, at the time, the second-largest result of his poker career. This win tops both of those paydays by a significant margin and Reis’ total career tournament earnings are now just shy of a half-million dollars, with the vast majority of that coming in Hollywood.
Reis entered Day 2 with an above-average stack of 178,000 chips, and he quickly moved his way to the very top of the leaderboard. He was the big stack when the bubble burst and one of the first players to cross the million-chip mark, ending the day as the chip leader with 35 players remaining.
Day 3 was more of the same for the eventual champion, who appeared to hold the chip lead wire to wire on the decisive day. By the time they reached the final table of nine, Reis had well in excess of 20 percent of the total chips in play, and his aggression to that point was rewarded with the lion’s share of the prize pool in the nine-way deal.
This event was held over the course of six days, with a total of eight starting flights feeding players into the combined Day 2. Pushing the tournament well past the guarantee and into the record books were Saturday’s Flight G and Flight H. The pair of start days combined to draw more than 2,000 entries and were the icing on the cake for the super-sized event.
Here was the flight-by-flight attendance breakdown:
Flight A: 403 Entries, 78 Advanced
Flight B: 443 Entries, 81 Advanced
Flight C: 409 Entries, 76 Advanced
Flight D: 457 Entries, 77 Advanced
Flight E: 647 Entries, 127 Advanced
Flight F: 656 Entries, 126 Advanced
Flight G: 994 Entries, 189 Advanced
Flight H: 1,009 Entries, 206 Advanced
Day 2: 960 Survivors, 35 Advanced
Day 3: Played to a winner
Final Table Results
1st: Rafael Reis – $155,642 + trophy
2nd: Rodrigo Diaz – $113,650
3rd: Allan Beiler – $105,096
4th: Michael Johnson – $97,164
5th: Alejandro Armas – $95,298
6th: Steve Cohen – $59,993
7th: Elizabeth Provan – $53,927
8th: Jack Rolnitzky – $53,460
9th: Michael Sanchez – $43,351