PokerStars Asia Pacific Macau tour sets new record

Dermot Blain from Dublin, Ireland, who qualified for the APPT Macau main event at the PokerStars Macau Poker Room at the Grand Lisboa, emerged as the victor after six days of play, winning us$ 529,131, the largest prize ever paid in a poker tournament in Asia.

Blain, a professional poker player who has previously won a few poker tournaments live and online, started playing tournament poker three years ago after visiting a local sporting club in Derry, and his experience helped him recover from being short-stacked at the beginning of the final table.

PokerStars.net sponsored player Mike Kim from South Korea who took second place to win us$ 374,264 and Daoxing ‘Bao Bao’ Chen, who is regularly seen at final tables in the ‘Macau Poker Cup’ tournaments, took third place of us$ 232,302. The PokerStars.net APPT Macau Summer Festival of Poker at the Grand Lisboa featured 38 events from August 15 to 30 with nearly 3,000 total entries and an aggregate prize pool of us$ 3,587,768.

Team PokerStars Pro and Poker World Champion Joe Hachem said that “it’s a wonderful experience to see the always-hospitable people of Macau and watch the sport of poker continue to grow.”

“It’s truly amazing how passionate the local players at PokerStars Macau are about poker and it’s abundantly obvious by not only the number of participants from Macau, Hong Kong and China but also the great results they are having in all the events. I’m looking forward to coming back to the Grand Lisboa next year,” he added.

“It’s been positively inspiring to see the dramatic growth of poker, poker culture and most notably poker playing fundamentals in Macau. The local and regional poker communities across Asia came out in force to support this year’s APPT, and really showed the world that they know what they’re doing on the felt - to many of our international players’ surprise and sometimes dismay,” Jeffrey Haas, president of the PokerStars.net Asia Pacific Poker Tour said.

“To have two Chinese players on the final table, and others from Korea and Kazakhstan, is a tremendous sign of things to come, as the future of live poker is clearly in Asia, and we hope the APPT remains its vibrant, beating heart,” he added. The next stop of the PokerStars.net APPT will be in Auckland, New Zealand from October 14 to 18.