2016 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown
Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Hollywood
Event #6
$350 No Limit Hold’em Black Chip Bounty
Total Entries: 140
Prize Pool: $28,000 + $14,000 in Bounty prizepool
April 4, 2016
After 12 hours of no limit hold’em, Carlos Loving takes down the $350 No Limit Hold’em Black Chip Bounty event, earning the fifth trophy of the series.
Loving topped a field of 140 players to take home $8,120 along with $100 for each bounty he earned along the way. The Tampa native battled Daren Stabinski heads-up for about an hour before taking down the title.
“It feels great to win,” said Loving. “It’s always awesome. I’m very competitive so I want to win every time I play.”
Loving is now a professional poker player, but made the transition to poker after having an extensive engineering background and a successful career as computer engineer. Loving’s engineering experience made the transition to poker easier.
“When I first started playing, I like it and realized that I was pretty good at it,” said Loving. “So I started studying it and when I got into the math of the game, it was pretty easy for me. I started using that in my game and my engineering background helped a lot.”
As the tournament got later, Loving’s stack began to grow and he was the chip leader at the outset of the final table. There was a discussion about giving everyone their bounties back at the final table, but Loving dismissed that notion right away and wanted to continue playing for the bounties.
“Saying no to that was because I was the chip leader,” he said. “I knew that there were short stacks and I knew that if I knocked them out, I gained $100. I knew that it was an advantage for me to put pressure on them, so there was no reason for me to let them take back their $100.”
Even though he was the dissenting voice against a bounty deal at the final table, Loving didn’t pick up many bounties along the way.
Almost all of the money he won was from the first place finish.
“I didn’t accumulate a bounty until I knocked out one person when we were down to 11,” he recalled.
That knockout solidified his chip lead at the final table and he never was short once that last table began. The action was fast for most of the final table and the eliminations quickly piled up, but once Loving was heads-up with Stabinski, things slowed down.
“We were 60 big blinds deep,” said Loving. “So I didn’t want to make any mistakes and try to get it all in preflop with any mediocre hand. I wanted to play postflop a lot. That’s why we were seeing a lot flops and playing small ball poker. It worked out for me.”
Here is a look at the results:
1st: Carlos Loving: $8,120
2nd: Daren Stabinski – $4,760
3rd: Joel Duarte – $2,800
4th: Howard Talesnick – $2,240
5th: Donte Larsen – $1,680
6th: Eric Riley – $1,400
7th: Seth Gilson – $1,120
8th: Shawn Nguyen – $840
9th: Francisco Milanes – $630
10th: Johanssy Joseph – $560
11th: Cesar Fuentes – $560
12th: Wendy Freedman – $560
13th: Ariel Rosello Quintana – $490
14th: Nissin Vaknin – $490
15th: Edward Mroczkowski – $490
16th: Ido Ashkenazi – $420
17th: Joseph Duchman – $420
18th: Robert Marcocchio – $420