The inaugural Asia Poker League (APL) Da Nang Main Event is in the books! Vietnam`s Nguyen Minh Tuan emerged victorious after outlasting a strong field of 525 entries, including China’s Liu Jian in heads-up. The eventual champion walked away with his career-best VND 2,026,500,000 ( INR 62.02 Lac) top prizemoney. He began the final day of the event as second in chips and went on to outlast solid players like Young Hwan Sun (9th), Lee Jong Wook (8th) Zhang Chi (7th), Song Daewoong (6th), Sumit Sapra (5th), Tiger Lee Seok Young (4th), Anton Widjaya (3rd) to eventually reach the heads-up play for the title with Jian.
Heads-up began with Vietnam’s Nguyen Minh Tuan being ahead with 8.745 Million against Jian’s 6.93 Million. Jian got a good start and was able to close the distance, but Tuan got back to big lead and eventually won the title. On the final hand, Tuan had Qc Jc against Qs 10s of Jian and the board ran out Kd 9c 8d 2h 10s, giving the former a queen-high straight to win the coveted pot as well as the title.
Recently added to the APL roster of brand ambassadors, Sapra was the lone Indian to advance to Day 3 among the final 33 survivors of the event. He began the day with a decent stack of 378,000 and did really well, winning a nice double-up from Shingo Endo and then busting Shingo Endo (14th) and Huy Pham (12th) to eventually reach the 9-handed final table with 970k chips – placed seventh in chips.
The final table of the marquee event began today at level 25 with 15k-30k blinds, with Indonesia’s Anton Widjaya leading the way in chips. Indian pro Sapra began the FT as one of the shortest stacks, but picked up the very first pot in the first level and then went on to win two more crucial pots during the next level. First, he secured a lucky double-up through Korea’s Tiger Lee whose pocket aces lost to Sapra’s pocket kings on a Kc 4s 2c 6h 3d board. That saw Sapra’s stack reach to 2.115M chips. A littler later, another pot came his way and this time he earned it from Nguyen Minh Tuan whose K3 lost to pockets sevens of Sapra.
Sapra was doing well but then he lost some of his chips and eventually his good run came to an end in 5th for VND 477,900,000 (INR14.68 Lac) after his pocket tens lost to Q10 on a 9h Ac 4s Qh 9c runout.
Sapra is a very active pro on the Asian circuit. His poker resume is filled with live cashes picked up in Macau, Vietnam, Jeju, Manila etc.This was his 5th final table finish and second APL FT of the year 2019. He had began the year on a strong note with back-to-back third-place finishes at the PPPoker World Championship, Manila in February. He followed up that by finishing fourth in the Victorious Poker Club Main Event for VND 106,000,000. His last recorded FT score was an eighth-place finish that he scored in the VND 11,000,000 Super DeepStack at the Asia Poker League (APL) Hanoi in August 2019. Today, he added another APL FT to his impressive resume by finishing 5th in the APL Da Nang Main Event.
Apart from Sapra, there were two more Indians who finished ITM in the event and they were Vikas Sahni (36th for VND 49,000,000 – INR 1.49 Lac) and Manish Lakhotia (53rd for VND 41,500,000 – INR 1.27 Lac).
Final Table Payouts (VND)
- Nguyen Minh Tuan – VND 2,026,500,000
- Liu Jian – VND 1,383,400,000
- Anton Widjaya – VND 889,700,000
- Tiger Lee Seok Young – VND 622,300,000
- Sumit Sapra – VND 477,900,000
- Song Daewoong – VND 397,200,000
- Zhang Chi – VND 329,500,000
- Lee Jong Wook – VND 262,800,000
- Young Hwan Sung – VND 197,400,000