Foxwoods Recap

The folks over in the editing suite at the World Poker Tour have to be thrilled.  Instead of having to find a story that will be interesting to work with they are going to have the option of many interesting story lines to focus on from the World Poker Finals that has just wrapped up at Foxwoods Casino.

A couple years back Nick Schulman won this event at the ripe old age of 21.  Lets drop him into the final six players and give him a shot at another title.  While we are at it who was it that won this event last year?  Oh yeah… Nenad Medic.  Who just happens to be the guy in the 1 seat coming into final table play and looking to take down back-to-back titles in this event. 

What else would make for exciting television?  How about an online superstar that plays the biggest games available, has just turned 21 and started making the rounds to all the WPT events, has a reputation for being hyper aggressive and comes into the final table with the chip lead.  Cue Tom “durrrr” Dwan to enter stage right.

Two previous champions from this event, an up and coming star, and lets toss in a local guy that won a super satellite for entry into multiple 10k events and is working on cashing in all of them and also taking the top spot away from the repeat hopefuls. Mike Vela won a tournament at the Borgata for $40,000 worth of entries into various tournaments and has managed to parlay that $1,100 entry into a couple top 20 finishes and has now backed it up even more by adding a victory to his previous 18th place and 13th place finishes. His title here earns him over $1.7 million but Vela says it’s not really going to change his life much and he is “going to work tomorrow.”

The two relative unknowns at the final table were Mike White and Mark Weitzman, who were fairly quickly eliminated leaving 4 handed play to the big 4 (or the big 3 + Vela, who now has a track record to make him very notable player, especially considering the minimal volume of tournaments he has been entering).

Dwan’s first final table can pretty much be summarized by two bad beats. Early on he had Nenad Medic all in with pocket queens against the Serb’s KQ, but a king hit and Nenad doubled up. Later on Dwan moved all in and was called by Vela. Tom had AK and was in a great spot against Vela’s KJ, but a jack on the river ended Dwan’s tournament with a 4th place finish ($324,244) and propelled Vela on to the title.

Medic started the day as the short stack and was able to make a comeback, but ended up falling in 3rd place ($486,367) to Vela, who did most of the dirty work at the final table eliminating every player except for 6th place ($189,142) finisher Mark Weitzman who Medic finished off.

Once Nenad was out of the way Vela was left to contend with Nick Schulman, who was favored by many going into final table play (specifically he was the top pick of all three of the PokerRoadRadio hosts). While Schulman might have had the skill and experience advantage he was a big dog in chips and it didn’t take long in heads up play for all of Nick’s remaining chips to find their way into the middle.

Nick had pocket fives and Vela was happy to take a show with AQ. An ace on the flop, and a queen for extra effect, left Nick looking for one of two remaining fives or some sort of combination of running cards to chop the pot. Nothing was in the works for him though, and instead of having a repeat title winner, there is now a new name to be added to the list of World Poker Final champions while Schulman has a 2nd place finish ($864,652) to go along with his past victory.

The leadup to the final table had its share of interesting moments too, with Freddy Deeb, TJ Cloutier, Young Phan, Jimmy Tran, and John Myung all making it to the fourth day of play and the final 19 players.

TJ ended up busting in 12th place ($72,955) while Deeb made it down to the final table of ten, but not the official final table of six, falling to Dwan for a ninth place finish ($108,081).

Not making the money in this tournament was pretty much everyone associated with PokerRoad. Barry Greenstein and Joe Sebok were both eliminated on Day 1A, Gavin Smith was out early on Day 1B with Court Harrington, Kevin Saul, Jeff Madsen, and Steve Sung all dropping from the field on Day 2.

Another Foxwoods World Poker Finals is in the books, with Nenad Medic and Nick Schulman doing their part to make their names permanent entries on the Foxwoods poker scene while Mike Vela is well on the way to making his name known throughout the poker world.