Had to wait for Soverel
It looked like it was going to happen, but we still had to wait a little while on Tuesday to be sure. David Peters has won the U.S. Poker Open Championship at the U.S. Poker Open for the second year in a row.
Despite Peters’ dominance over the past week, Sam Soverel still had a chance to vault all the way from outside the top ten into the pole position on the points leaderboard if he won the twelfth and final event of the 2021 U.S. Poker Open. It was a longshot, as he was the shortest stack going into the six-handed final table yesterday, but hey, Peters was one of the short stacks on Monday and he won, so Peters still had to sweat the $50,000 No-Limit Hold’em final table.
Soverel did advance in the tournament standings, but only one spot, bowing out in fifth place to earn $168,000 and 101 championship points. Those points were good enough to get him into the top ten on the leaderboard, but only to seventh place and far from Peters.
Peters won by a large margin
With three wins and four total cashes, David Peters dominated the Open, earning 646 total championship points and $832,950 in tournament earnings. For his championship, he also received an additional $50,000 prize and the new Golden Eagle Trophy.
In the end, it wasn’t even close. Sean Winter was second place on the leaderboard with 484 points and Ali Imsirovic was third just one point behind Winter. Imsirovic actually had one more cash than Peters, but Peters’ three wins compared to Imsirovic’s one were the big difference. Winter was second in total earnings with $785,700.
Rounding out the top ten were Stephen Chidwick, Dan Shak, Jake Daniels, Soverel, Andrew Lichtenberger, Joe McKeehen, and Steve Zolotow.
Rack up the dollars, rack up the points
With PokerGo’s new ranking system, it isn’t the order of finish in a tournament that is important so much as it is the buy-in and prize money. Of course, they are all related, but in PokerGo’s case, it really is only the buy-in and prize money won in a tournament that matter.
For example, Sean Winter won the final event, cashing for $756,000. On PokerGo’s points table, a $700,000 cash in tournament with a buy-in of $25,000-$99,999 is worth 420 points. An $800,000 cash is worth 480 points. Do the math to calculate the in-between and Winter earned 454 championship points.
The 2021 U.S. Poker Open was really the first festival on the new PokerGO Tour that was hyped, but it wasn’t the first of the season. Ali Imsirovic has a sizeable lead right now in the season’s points race with 1,897 total points. So far, he has six wins, 17 cashes, and almost $2.5 million in earnings on the season. Sean Perry is in second with 1,256 points, followed by Winter with 1,150.
David Peters is sixth with 646 points, all earned during the U.S. Poker Open.
Cover photo courtesy of PokerGO.com.
