One of the great things about playing poker online is the opportunity it presents for the mere mortal to mix it with the great and the good of the poker world.
Over the past month we have been running a series of satellite tournaments offering the chance to win a seat at the Aussie Millions, the most prestigious tournament Down Under and one of the biggest in the world.
Yesterday saw the culmination of the race to win free entry with two Super-Satellite tournaments, one for Australia and New Zealand and one for the rest of the world. In total twenty-seven people will be making their way to Melbourne in January hoping to emulate PartyPoker.com ambassador Stewart Scott and take home the estimated AUS$2.5m ($2.3m or £1.4m) first prize.
Aussie Millions ANZ Friendly Final
A total of 149 people had qualified or bought-in to the $640 ANZ Friendly Final. Originally we were only guaranteeing five seats to the Aussie Millions but due to the unexpectedly large field the number of qualifying places was increased to seven. On offer was a $12,000 package including main event buy-in, accommodation in the luxurious Crown Promenade Hotel and $500 towards travel costs.
Play got underway at 18:45 Australia/NSW time but lasted an astonishing seven hours as players fought for their tournament life. Nobody was going to give up this opportunity too easily. With the blinds increasing pressure began to tell on the small stacks and eventually the field began to dwindle.
With just the top ten places winning prize money ‘parra05’ was the first unlucky bubble boy as his brave all-in push with an open-ended straight draw against SERGEY_LUTS top pair. The draw failed to improve and parra05 bust out.
Despite the game entering the paid places everything was still to play for as only the final seven would get their hands on the dream ticket to Oz. Ironically it was SERGEY_LUTS who bust just outside of the tournament package places.
SERGEY_LUTS hit an open-ended straight draw on the flop, while the heads-up oponnent VeryElegant had a pair of aces with top kicker. Series of raises and rereaises followed, SERGEY_LUTS went all-in, was called but didn’t improve on his draw. He left with $2700, a tidy sum but probably no consolation for hitting the bubble.
Aussie Millions Rest Of The World Final
Following on from the ANZ final came the Rest of the World version with a total of 453 hopefuls sitting down to compete for one of twenty Aussie Millions packages. The game lasted for eight hours, just one more than the ANZ final, which shows how tight that tourney was.
This time the unlucky player to bust on the bubble was xyesguyx. After pushing all-in pre-flop with 4c, Ad he was met by a monster KK held by gOT1LT whose table talk proved to be perfectly timed!
22-37-56:g0T1Lt: if I can just ruin one more persons day
22-38-00:g0T1Lt: ill be happy
xyesguyx didn’t get any luck on the board and ended up without the money prize or Australian package.
Here’s the Aussie Millions Roll of Honour
These are the players that will be travelling to AussieMillions next month. We have interviewed some of them, and you can read about their experience from the final qualifier here and more interviews also here.
- kavinda111
- VeryElegant
- carlton_hahn
- biggiemal
- Ty_100
- AUSSIE1964
- LIKE_A_BOSS
- thenextdurrr
- g0T1Lt
- Andrei6868
- Turbowurst
- Brink82
- ankstrajks
- makuzzen
- MWT55
- Parisien
- tepupatata
- CptObvious
- metadiol
- BudQuaffer
- ThundrXpress
- Lakseprinsen
- philbort
- Org45
- BONANZA_007
- bakspejlet
- DJSP77
Congratulations to our twenty-seven qualifiers who will be off to the Crown Casino in Melbourne next month. The AUS $10,500 main event gets under way on the 24th of January. Be sure to come back to the blog to see how the guys get on at the Aussie Millions.
