The Australian player Luke Brabin won the first of ten bracelets of the World Series of Poker Asia-Pacific on October 2nd. The event was held at the Crown Casino, Melbourne.
The game type of the WSOP was No Limit Hold’em with an AU$1,100 buy-in. The first spot prize is over AU$130,000, a lot more than all the money that Brabin has ever won from former tournaments.
That explains his emotional response when asked how he feels about winning the tournament – ‘I will definitely be sticking the bracelet up for everyone to see somewhere in my new home, this is the start of a new time in my life.’ He further added that the 1st place brought hope to his life as he had been going through some dark periods of his life.
Now Brabin believes he is able to carry on competing on a higher professional level.
There are nine more gold bracelet events coming next at the WSOP-APAC and the odd thing is that none of the current players has participated in a WSOP final table before. All players are also Australian.
Brabin is currently the 162nd in the Australian poker all-time money list with an overall earnings of AU$187,000. The 34-year-old player officially started his poker career back in 2007 when he got the 5th place with AU$27,000 earnings at the 2007 Crown’s Aussie Millions Poker Championship Event Number 4 – No Limit Hold’em.
Since then, he has participated in nine more poker events, the biggest one he has won being the WSOP-APAC.
Brabin was born in Melbourne and considers himself as an entrepreneur, yet acknowledges that in many occasions he is proud to say he is a pro poker player. When he won the bracelet he shared “winning a bracelet was absolutely an ultimate goal of mine in poker, the World Series of Poker is just the pinnacle of events, so obviously it means something more than winning other random tournaments here in Australia.”
His Biggest Achievement
Brabin is extremely happy for winning the WSOP-APAC against all-Australian opponents. Do not get this wrong, there were many internationally recognized player in the entry bracket of 611 players. Some of the names worth mentioning are former WSOP finalists Brandon Shack-Harris, Jeff Madsen, George Danzer and Antonio Esfandiari. The closest spot a former WSOP-APAC bracelet winner could get was Aaron Lim who took 14th place followed by Gary Benson and Dan Heimiller.
The final table began with Brabin having an advantage with the highest chip stack. Some may find it amazing, others boring, but Brabin managed to keep his lead throughout the day and that made him part of the WSOP record books.
Thinking of the prize pool this year which was three times bigger than last year, from AU$211,000 to AU$611,000, the performance of Brabin is one of a kind and the next contestants for a golden bracelet will have to work hard to reach his level.
