The Seminole Hard Rock Lucky Hearts Poker Open or the first major festival to be taking place at Seminole Hard Rock Casino Hollywood this year kicked off in style with the multiple starting flight $360 Ultimate Re-Entry No-Limit Hold’em event.
The tournament featured eight starting flights to draw a mammoth field of 4,756 runners, one of the largest to have ever been generated in Florida. The event originally featured a guaranteed prize pool of $500,000, but the massive interest resulted in the prize money almost being tripled to $1,426,800.
Jerry Wong, a local favorite and 2016 WSOP November Niner, bested the tournaments’ field to grab a payout of $250,000 and the guitar pick-shaped trophy. The player added his first-place payout to his previous live tournament winnings of more than $2.5 million.
The Ultimate Re-Entry event featured unique format that allowed players to enter as many opening flights as they found fit and thus amass multi-stack payouts if they managed to survive through more than one starting flights and advance into Day 2. During the starting flight stage, players played down to 10% of each flight’s field.
Day 2 of the event started with 387 survivors, led by Casey Carroll. The field was whittled down to under 100 players before the time for dinner break came. However, the remaining hopefuls could not determine the winner on Day 2 and 22 players had to return for an additional day of play on Tuesday.
The nine-handed final table was set after three hours of play. Michael Laake and Victor Figueroa were the players to head the chip counts chart at that time. And it was after the beginning of the final table when Wong started amassing chips to emerge as the chip leader. He held two-thirds of all chips on the table at the time there were only four players left.
The four hopefuls decided to divide what has remained of the prize pool, with Wong collecting the biggest share and the trophy and thus being named the event’s champion. The other players – Nancy Thomas, Victor Figueroa, and Steven McKoy – took $104,113, $103,826, and $91,241, respectively.
Wong’s latest in-the-money finish secured him with the third largest payout of his poker career. In November 2016, the player finished 8th in the WSOP $10,000 Main Event for $1,100,076. In 2013, he took 3rd place in the PCA $10,300 Main Event, good for a payout of $725,000.
