The Venetian Las Vegas has played host to the Card Player Poker Tour IV – DeepStack Extravaganza III poker festival over the past two months. The highlight tournament – the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event with a guaranteed prize pool of $2 million, was completed late on Friday with Jon Turner emerging as the winner. The Las Vegas player scooped a first-place payout of $536,858 and the tournament trophy.
The event kicked off on July 17 and attracted an overall field of 537 entries. As mentioned above, it featured a guaranteed prize pool of $2 million but given the wide interest in the tournament, that figure was exceeded. The eventual prize pool generated amounted to $2,497,050. The money was distributed to the top 20 contenders, with lowest payouts totaling $22,723. Each of the nine players who made it to the final table was guaranteed a minimum payout of $47,444.
Day 4 of the tournament was its last one. It kicked off with 16 hopefuls returning to The Venetian poker tables to set the final table and play down to a champion. The 16 remaining contenders, with notables like Adrian Mateos, Tim Reilly, and Jeremy Ausmus being among them, were led by Thomas Paul with 2,850,000 in chips. Turner was second in chips at that point.
It took about three hours of play for the names of the nine finalists to become clear. And players needed more than eight hours to determine who the two head-up opponents would be. Eventually, Turner faced Artem Metalidi heads-up. At that point, the eventual winner had a solid stack and huge chip advantage over his last remaining opponent.
Despite having almost five times less chips than Turner, Metalidi proved to be a tough competitor. Two-handed duel lasted for an hour and a half. On what turned out to be the last hand in play, Turner raised to 255,000 and Metalidi moved all in for his remaining 1,380,000. Turner called instantly with [Ah][9h]. His opponent tabled [Qc][Qs]. The board ran out [Kh][8c][4h][Jc][Ad], securing Turner with a top pair and the title. As for Metalidi, the Ukrainian scooped a $329,860 consolation prize for his efforts.
Dan Heimiller finished 3rd in the event, good for $237,719. Start-of-the-day chip leader Thomas Paul took 4th place for $179,788. Matthew Parry collected a payout of $134,841 for his fifth-place finish. Jeremy Ausmus took 6th place, good for $102,379.
Ilan Boujenah was the player to finish 7th. His share of the prize pool totaled $79,906. Erick Lindgren took 8th place for $62,426. Timothy Reily rounded out the official final table for $47,444.
