2015 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown
$570 No Limit Hold’em Double Black Chip Bounty (Single Re-Entry)
$50,000 Guarantee
April 13th, 2015
Total Entries: 169
Total Prize Pool: $50,700
Recap:
After an hour-long heads-up match against Will Failla, Ido Ashkenazi said, “This is it. This is going to be the last hand.” And he was right.
Failla looked down at his cards and moved all in with . Ashkenazi checked his cards and called with . The board came , and Ashkenazi won the pot with a set to win the final bounty of the tournament — and the trophy.
The key pot for Failla came with 11 players remaining, when he got it all in with a set of sixes against Natasha Barbour’s set of threes after a flop of . That pot propelled Failla into the chip lead, and that momentum carried Failla deep. When the tournament was over, Failla said that once the final table began, he only hit four or five flops — and that includes an hour of quick heads-up play where they were seeing lots of hands.
As for Ashkenazi, he built his stack more gradually, collecting bounties on short-stacks Marcus Stein (who finished seventh) and Eric Ward (sixth) while slowly increasing his stack to take the chip lead away from Failla.
When they got heads up, Ashkenazi had a solid lead of 1,090,000 to 600,000, but it was all Ashkenazi from there.
Ashkenazi slowly but steadily increased his chip lead by taking pot after pot from Failla. During the hour of heads-up play, there were only three all-in situations — but each time Ashkenazi had at least a 9-to-1 chip lead, so even those two times that Failla doubled, it barely cut into Ashkenazi’s lead.
Ashkenazi is a locksmith from New York, but he is moving down to South Florida in two weeks with plans to become a professional tournament poker player. Now Ashkenazi has a Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown trophy and title to begin the next stage of his poker career.
Event 9 attracted 169 entries to create a prizepool of $50,700, plus a $200 bounty on each player. The final two tables (18 players) finished in the money.
Final Table Results:
1st: Ido Ashkenazi – $15,716
2nd: Will Failla – $9,126
3rd: Nissim Vaknin – $5,831
4th: John Merchant – $4,107
5th: Blair Miller – $3,169
6th: Eric Ward – $2,408
7th: Marcus Stein – $1,876
8th: Arkadiy Tsinis – $1,394
9th: Natasha Barbour – $989