The final table of the PCA Main Event featured two well established poker pros in Mike Sowers and Sam Stein, as well as the young chip-leader Chris Oliver –an online poker pro who went into the final day of play with 40% of the chips in play in his ship-stack. But lost in the shuffle was 24 year-old poker pro Galen Hall who was able to quietly make the final table and quietly survive all the way to heads-up play against Oliver.

Oliver was never challenged at the final table and controlled 30 million of the 47 million chips in play for most of the final table. After dominating the tournament for nearly three days, Oliver’s good fortunes finally came to an end in a 30 minute span that saw Galen Hall –the survivor—go from 10 million chips to nearly even, to massive chip-leader, and finally to PCA champion!

Hall’s first double-up came when he flopped two-pair against Oliver’s bottom two-pair, which was followed by the two going all-in on the very next hand; Oliver holding A-9 to Hall’s Pocket Kings! About 25 minutes later Hall cracked Oliver’s Pocket Queens with A-8 and was able to add his name to the list of PCA champions.

Here is a look at how the final table participants finished in the 2011 PCA:

1.    Galen Hall $2,300,000
2.    Chris Oliver $1,800,000
3.    Anton Ionel $1,350,000
4.    Sam Stein $1,000,000
5.    Mike Sowers $700,000
6.    Bolivar Palacios $450,000
7.    Max Weinberg $300,000
8.    Philippe Plouffe $202,000

Tags: Galen Hall, PCA champion, PCA Main Event, PCA Main Event winner

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.