The Amateur Poker Association and Tour (APAT) Irish Amateur Poker Championships took place at Bewley’s Hotel in Dublin from 10-11 January.<\/p>\n
It was an historic event in that it marked the first time an APAT Main Event was played as Pot-Limit Omaha instead of the industry standard No Limit Hold’em.<\/p>\n
The switch to four hole cards didn’t put players off entering and 73 hopefuls parted company with \u20ac120 for 20,000 tournament chips (plus a further 20,000 thanks to the double chance element) hoping to become an APAT champion.<\/p>\n
That honour went Scott Gray who beat Eamon Kelly heads-up for the title. <\/p>\n
Despite starting the second day second-last of the 24 players who returned, Gray safely navigated his way to the final table but went into the heads-up stage trailing two-to-one in chips.<\/p>\n
But Gray, fourth in the 2002 World Series of Poker Main Event for a career-best score of US$281,480, played the more aggressive of the two, drew level and then pushed in front himself.<\/p>\n
The final hand saw all of the chips go in on a 4-10-7 flop, Kelly holding 6-5-2-2 and Gray the KC-KH-3H-2D. The kings held as an ace fell on the turn and a meaningless ace on the river, busting Kelly and leaving Gray to be crowed amateur champion of Ireland.<\/p>\n
Third place, and a bronze medal, went to Anton Nesternko.<\/p>\n
APAT Irish Amateur Poker Championships<\/b>
\n1 Scott Gray \u20ac2,050
\n2 Eamon Kelly \u20ac1,450
\n3 Anton Nesternko \u20ac1,050
\n4 Colm Faulkner \u20ac800
\n5 Rory Keogh \u20ac600
\n6 Colin Wilson \u20ac450
\n7 Roy Brindley \u20ac350
\n8 Richard Baker \u20ac300
\n9 John Keown \u20ac250<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Amateur Poker Association and Tour (APAT) Irish Amateur Poker Championships took place at Bewley’s Hotel in Dublin from 10-11 January. It was an historic event in that it marked the first time an APAT Main Event was played as Pot-Limit Omaha instead of the industry standard No Limit Hold’em. The switch to four hole…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3168,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[295],"class_list":["post-3167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-apat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3169,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3167\/revisions\/3169"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.puffapoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}