The 2013 World Poker Tour $25k Championship is now in the books and it was quite an interesting road to the final table as the event had to cancel a full day of play, as well as seeing an incredibly short penultimate day where the field played-down from eight players to six. With the abbreviated schedule the final table began with 363 big blinds spread among the final six players, which meant we were probably in for a very long day, even though 220 of those Big Blinds were in the possession of just two players, Chino Rheem and Erick Lindgren.

In the end the two troubled poker pros (more on this below) lead proved insurmountable for the rest of the field, and when heads-up play began with Rheem extending his lead, now sitting on a stack of some 11 million chips compared to Lindgren’s 3.5 million, and despite a valiant effort by Lindgren, who extended the match by some 100 hands and two hours, it was Chino Rheem who came out on top, collecting his second WPT title and denying Lindgren a spot among Gus Hansen and Carlos Mortensen as the only players with three WPT titles on their resume.

Here is a look at the final table payouts from the 2013 Season XI WPT Championship:

Despite their success –Rheem has pocketed over $7 million in live tournaments over the course of his career, while Lindgren has amassed over $9 million in career tournament earnings—both men have been called out in recent years for substantial debts. According to multiple people on 2+2 Chino Rheem is a serial borrower who has a tendency of not paying his debts, while Lindgren racked-up seven-figure fantasy football debts according to Bob Voulgaris and others.

To be fair to both men, Chino has historically made good on his debts when he makes a big score, and Lindgren has stated that he has entered a gambling treatment facility and plans on making things right with the people he owes money to. It’s unclear what percentage of their action each player had in the WPT Championship, but with the duo winning $1.75 million collectively, I’m sure the Bellagio was overrun with people looking to settle their debts with Rheem and Lindgren.

The World Poker Tour will now take an extended break as the poker world converges on Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker tournament series; Season XII of the WPT will kick-off sometime in early August if history is any kind of indicator.

*Resources: www.worldpokertour.com, www.thehendonmob.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 25th, 2013 at 3:58 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.