The 2007 World Poker Open Championship Event wrapped yesterday, and Bryan Sumner took down the title and over $900,000 in cash. This is the second year in a row that this event has failed to reach $1 million for first place. Quite surprisingly, the total number of entrants only reached 294 as opposed to last year which had 327. It will be interesting to see if other upcoming main events can maintain the numbers that we have seen over the past few years. The final 9 finishers in this tournament and their prize money were as follows:
1 Bryan Sumner (Bluff reports $904,574, CardPlayer reports $913,986)
2 Daniel Negreanu (Bluff reports $497,517, CardPlayer reports $502,691)
3 Young Cho $257,058
4 Gary Kainer $199,934
5 Thang "Kido" Pham $171,372
6 J.C. Tran $142,810
7 Robert Thompson $114,248
8 Matt Russell $85,686
9 James Bullard $57,124
For a complete recap of the tournament, visit the guys over at Bluff Magazine who covered the event live.
1. The Bluff numbers were the original numbers reported by the tournament staff. I think they revised it somewhere around the third or fourth day and it was never changed on the payout tab.
And so far as it being surprising that 1st was less than $1M - there's one key factor at work. No online qualifiers hurts, of course, but the main thing is the competition across town from the WSOPC at the Grand. At a $5K buy-in, the satelliters that usually would've gone to Gold Strike ended up blowing through their cash at the Grand instead and having nothing left when it's time to play the WPO. This was the second year in a row for such competition, which explains the low numbers (there were >600 at the WPO two years ago) and the under-$1M prize.
Posted at 10:33PM on Jan 27th 2007 by Spaceman