It’s taken him twenty years to do it, but this morning Andy Black has woken up a champion. This weekend saw the affable Irishman win his first major poker tournament after he was the last man standing at the PartyPoker.com Premier League final table.
To do so, he had to beat a final table packed with talent. Annie Duke, Marcel Luske, Roland De Wolfe, Tony G and Alexander Kravchenko lined up alongside Black in their quest to win the Premier League Grand Final.
Until now, Black’s defining moment has also been his biggest bugbear, after he went to the 2005 WSOP Main Event final table with one third of the chips in play. He walked away in fifth place and with thoughts of what might have been.
Black may have been having flashbacks when sitting down on the final table of the Premier League as one of the chip leaders. There was no implosion here though, and Black managed to win $250,000 as well as ridding himself of a poker demon to boot.
While the Premier League was a personal triumph for Black, it was a miserable event for Phil Hellmuth. Last year Hellmuth was dominant, winning four heats and eventually finishing up in second place. This time around he could only muster eight points all season, and finished at the bottom of the table - that and 'The Dorchester Cap Fiasco' means Phil has had a trip he might prefer to forget...