Big Success for Selbst

Selbst Wins High Roller, Makes History

The $25K buy-in NLHE High Roller tournament at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure was well-attended with 161 individual players and 43 of them who reentered. That put together a $4,998,000 prize pool and was set to pay the top 24 players.

Day 1 reduced the field to 80 players, and Vladimir Troyanovskiy was the chip leader. The second day of action was a long evening as the final table was eventually set, and it happened when Mike Watson eliminated Chris Klodnickiin ninth place, which was worth $99,960.

The final table began on January 14 with Shaun Deeb as the chip leader with more than 2.5 million chips, and the next player on the leaderboard was Troyanovskiy with 1,625,000 chips. Watson was close behind, as was Vanessa Selbst and Ole Schemion. Tobias Reinkemeier had 876K, Bryn Kenney had only 484K, and Micah Raskin was the shortest stack with 389K.

The shorter stacks were the first three players to be eliminated, and then the chip counts changed when Vanessa Selbst doubled through Schemion to take the chip lead. As she continued to climb, Deeb lost ground and was eliminated by Selbst. Watson send Schemion out in fourth place, but Selbst took out Watson next.

Selbst began heads-up play with nearly 7.8 million chips, and Troyanovskiy had just over 2.4 million. The latter lost ground and doubled twice to stay in action but not much beyond his starting stack. He continued that pattern until his pocket kings were cracked by her A-Q when an ace hit on the river.

Selbst not only won more than $1.4 million for this victory, but this put her over $7 million in lifetime live tournament earnings. That pushed her ahead of longtime leader Kathy Liebert, and Selbst is now the all-time winningest female player, not to mention one of the best player in any category in the world.

The PCA High Roller official results were:

1^st place: Vanessa Selbst ($1,424,420)

2^nd place: Vladimir Troyanovskiy ($792,180)

3^rd place: Mike Watson ($462,320)

4^th place: Ole Schemion ($354,860)

5^th place: Shaun Deeb ($289,880)

6^th place: Bryn Kenney ($229,900)

7^th place: Tobias Reinkemeier ($174,940)

8^th place: Micah Raskin ($129,940)