Year after year, the World Series of Poker draws the largest crowd at the COLOSSUS event with buy in at an affordable $400. This season was no different with a record-breaking 19,337 entries to generate a prize pool of $5,940,883.
Many players from Asia were scattered around the floor with a large number surviving into Day 2 / ITM round. For instance, South Korea’s Dohang Na bagged up the second largest stack and eventually finished 66th; Hong Kong’s Ivan Hon Cheong Lee finished an even better 46th place; and Japan’s Junya Matsueda climbed to 25th place.
This left only two Asians in the lineup, both players from Singapore. Lisa Tan was first to bow out in 16th place, turning her buy in into a substantial $27,000 payday. Yujian Eugen Zhou was on his WSOP debut and nearly locked up the gold but couldn’t get past Bulgaria’s Martin Alcaide at heads up. Zhou had to settle for a mighty payout instead of $325,640 while Alcaide shipped $501,250 to go with his first WSOP bracelet.
Prior to this event, Zhou only had $62,260 in live tournament career winnings with a high of $20,490 earned at the Poker Dream 9 Malaysia Monster Stack event for 5th place. Zhou has now catapulted to $388K in earnings, to go from 88th rank in the Singapore All Time Money List to 18th rank.
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