Paul Pham wins Black Belt Poker London Live
Monday, 15 March 2010
As line ups for a $200 buy-in event go you'd be hard pushed to find anything stronger than the one that appeared at London Live this weekend. The 300 runner field contained winners from the WSOP, EPT, GUKPT not to mention the Irish Open but in the end it was a little known Frenchman who took the title.
Paul Pham, a VIP manager from an online card room, went into the final table boasting a very handy chip lead and he put that lead to excellent use by eliminating no fewer than four of his final table rivals.
The 27-year-old sealed the win by beating Karim Louis heads up. The chips went in on a 7d-10d-Jc board with Pham's Kc-Jd dominating Louis' Js-6c. A king on the turn gave the man from Lyon an unassailable lead and with it the $15,000 first prize.
Speaking on the Black Belt Poker blog Pham said, “I play pretty much all of my poker online and am mainly a cash game player. I don't play live very often and have only played three tournaments so far. I only played this one because the structure was deep and it suited my game.”
“There were a lot of strong players in the tournament,” he continued. “Daniel Laming was very good and gave me a bit of a hard time on Day One. So was Jack [McDermott] on my left. He’s a decent player and I managed to get lucky against him on the final table with A-J versus A-K.”
The final table positions and payouts were as follows:
1st Paul Pham -- $15,000
2nd Karim Louis -- $10,000
3rd Hugo Martin -- $6,000
4th Jack McDermott -- $4,500
5th Dean Aldred -- $3,500
6th Warren Wooldridge -- $2,500
7th Nicholas Aly -- $2,000
8th Daniel Laming -- $1,500
9th Roy Farranat -- $1,000
image courtesy of
BlackBeltPoker.com.