The drought for woman will continue after Vanessa Selbst’s second place finish in the World Poker Tour (WPT) Borgata Poker Open main event. After launching in 2002 the WPT has yet to crown a female champion after over 11 seasons and over 150 tournaments.

Selbst now joins Gigi Gagne, Lily Kiletto, Kathy Liebert and JJ Liu as female players that have finished as the runner-up in a WPT Main Event – Natalia Nikitina and Van Nguyen have both won WPT tournaments, but neither tournament is considered an “official” WPT main event –Nikitina won a WPT National Series tournament in 2011 and Nguyen won the WPT Celebrity Invitational in 2008.

Selbst’s run to the title –and poker history—was derailed during heads-up play when she had her opponent, eventual winner Anthony Zinno, all-in, but Zinno held the advantage with AT to Selbst’s A8. Zinno doubled through Selbst in that hand and took his new 2-1 chip advantage straight to the winner’s circle.

Anthony Zinno is no stranger to poker tables, having been an active tournament player since 2007, but the win marks the first major tournament title for the Boston native. In fact, the win is the first of Zinno’s career according to his Hendon Mob page, and the $825k first-place prize is nearly double his previous career tournament earnings.

Despite having the third largest chip-stack at the start of the final table Zinno wasn’t really on anyone’s radar, as most of the attention was thrown at Vanessa Selbst and chip-leader Cong Pham who had been dominant throughout the entire tournament. But in the end it would be Zinno who stole the headlines (not for this column though) and earned the prestigious WPT Borgata Poker open trophy.

Here is a look at the chip-counts and seating assignments heading into the final table:

* Seat 1. Eric Fields – 3,150,000 (31 bb)

* Seat 2. Anthony Zinno – 6,935,000 (69 bb)

* Seat 3. Vanessa Selbst – 7,910,000 (79 bb)

* Seat 4. David Randall – 3,520,000 (35 bb)

* Seat 5. Jeremy Kottler – 3,925,000 (39 bb)

* Seat 6. Cong Pham – 10,190,000 (101 bb)

Here is a look at the final table payouts from the tournament:

1. Anthony Zinno — $825,099

2. Vanessa Selbst — $492,569

3. Cong Pham — $301,225

4. Jeremy Kottler — $251,968

5. David Randall — $208,394

6. Eric Fields — $168,610

The next stop for the World Poker Tour will be the bwin WPT Grand Prix in Paris, France, which will take place from October 25-30, and features a €7,500 buy-in.

*Resources: www.worldpokertour.com

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 21st, 2013 at 10:50 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.