The first Monster World Poker Tour (WPT) Tournament of Champions took place last night and it was decisively won by the Morrocan professional poker player, Farid Yachou. He walked away with the WPT crown and a prize of $381,600 for first-place. As well as this, Yachou won a range of luxurious prizes worth over $150,000, including 2016 Corvette, a Titanium watch, a solid gold MasterCard, a pair of gold Headphones, a custom poker table, a seat in Tiger’s Poker Night Presented by World Poker Tour and more.

With his recent victory, Yachou has now earned over $600,000 in career live tournament earnings. He only has two live tournament wins on record, his only previous victory was last year in the WPT Amsterdam tournament where he walked away with over $243,000 in winnings.

The Tournament of Champions finale got off to a cracking start, with two-time WPT winner Darren Elias fell to Yachou as he cashed out with $58,300. After Elias’ elimination, the Florida based poker pro Noah Schwartz busted in fifth place just two hands after Elias. Schwartz was then followed by another fellow Floridian, Jonathan Jaffe who ended up cashing out with $95,400. He had to make do with fourth place, despite starting the final table as the chip leader. He busted out on the 45th hand, and the game continued after his elimination.

After Jaffe crashed out, Michael Mizrachi held half of the remaining chips in play. “The Grinder” had double the amount of chips of either of his two other opponents and plenty of experience sealing the deal in big tournaments. However, things didn’t really go his way after this, as he started to fall flat. Yachou took a sizeable number of chips from him to move into the lead and Mizrachi was forced to slide into third place. He made what would turn out to be his final move during hand 60. With a cash out of $140,450, he couldn’t have had much to complain about however.

Entering the head to head duel after the departure of “the Grinder”, Yachou held a slight lead with almost 1.7 million in chips to the Romanian player, Vlad Darie’s 1.545 million. He was just five big blinds ahead and needed to retain his momentum. Head to head play took another 12 hands of poker, with the final one taking place on hand number 72 of the final table. On that final hand, Darie raised on the button to 50,000, Yachou called from the big blind. Yachou check-raised Darie’s next bet of 50,000 to 250,000, and Darie made the call. Yachou moved all in for nearly 1.6 million chips, having his opponent caught in a bind. In the end, Yachou impressed the crowd with a full house and he made his mark on the WPT Tournament of Champions with an impressive win. Vlad Darie walked away with a second place prize of $224,190

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2016 at 9:36 am 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.