Dallas Berry, a 71-year-old retired truck driver and occasional poker player, won his first WSOP Circuit gold ring last night. The single-day $365 No-Limit Hold’em tournament at IP Biloxi Mississippi was clearly his event to emerge victorious in. Berry collected a first-place prize of $8,551.
The $365 No-Limit Hold’em was the second single-day turbo event to be played at the casino as part of the 2016/17 WSOP Circuit Mississippi stop. One such tournament took place on September 9, with Steven Giddings winning it. And the WSOP Circuit IP Biloxi poker festival was opened with a four-day $365 Double Stack No-Limit Hold’em Re-Entry with a guaranteed prize pool of $200,000. The event’s final day is set to be played today.
Looking back at Berry’s tournament, it attracted as many as 95 players to generate a prize pool of $28,500. The top 12 finishers left the event’s tables with a payout, min-cashes worth $595.
The unofficial final table of ten was reached late on Saturday. David Trausch was the one to hold the most chips at that point. He led the ten finalists with a total of 169,000 in chips. As for Berry, he was the short stack at the beginning of ten-handed play. Typically for the Turbo formats, action developed quickly from that point on and it took about four hours of play for the name of the winner to become clear.
Although he was only five big blinds away from being eliminated at the beginning of the unofficial final table, Berry managed to emerge as the winner. Jared Ambler was his heads-up opponent. Finishing runner-up in the event, Ambler scooped a $5,284 cash. Both Berry and his heads-up opponent cashed for the very first time within the WSOP Circuit. It is actually interesting to note that most of the finalists did not have much previous experience in WSOP Circuit events.
Easton Oreman finished 3rd in the event for $3,763. Charles Edwards took 4th place, good for $2,733. David Trausch scooped a payout of $2,025 for taking 5th place. David Black finished 6th for $1,528. Robert Ward collected $1,176 for his seventh-place finish. Brian Paulus took 8th place for a total of $921. Cole Gober rounded out the official nine-handed final table for $734.
