The Argentinian poker player Andres Korn took down a field of 623 players in Event #56, $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em, bringing back home the cash prize of $618,285 and first-career WSOP gold bracelet.
Korn has become the second poker player from exotic Argentina, who managed to collect a gold bracelet from the Series. He secured this honor after an intense game of no-limit Hold’em. In fact, this is the fourth cash prize of the player from a WSOP event, but the recently-won first prize almost doubled the player’s poker earnings. Nevertheless, in a post-victory interview, the winner explained that what matters for him mostly is the gold bracelet, as this is the real achievement for a poker player.
The final table was set on Day 3, when the player appeared to be the chip-leader. He did not retreat from his leading position even for a moment, but rather continued to back it up. Fortune smiled at the poker player that day, as he even managed to knock off the first two players, who left the final table – Sergio Cabrera, who raked $41,031 for his 9th place, and Mark Zullo, who added $53,615 to his poker earnings for his 8th position in the list of finalists.
The next two players, who needed to go home without the gold bracelet were eliminated by Korn’s eventual heads-up opponent Pete Chen. Thus, the number of players was reduced from 9 to only 5 in less than an hour. The second elimination round saw two more players to go home, being eliminated by Korn, who was at that time on fire. Hence, the player established himself at the chip-lead position, without the intention to leave it.
The three-handed battle was between Korn, Chen and Thomas Boivin, who could not manage to outlast the aggressive play of the Argentinian poker player and was eliminated at 3rd place with $264,306 prize in his pockets.
The players, who entered the heads-up duel were Andres Korn and his Taiwanese opponent Pete Chen. But it was Korn, who was keeping the chip advantage over Chen, with more than 2 times bigger stack of chips. The eventual winner was depleting Chen’s stack of chips gradually, until he managed to leave his opponent with only 1,000,000 in chips.
The final hand in play saw Chen’s [Kc][9d] bumping into Korn’s [9s][8s] on a board of [8d][9h][5s][6s][6h]. Korn managed to strike two pairs and secure the title and the first-prize of $618,285, leaving Chen at the runner-up position with $382,122 in cash.
Following the course of the game, it appears that the lucky card of the winner is eight of any kind, as he managed to eliminate two of his opponents (including his runner-up) namely with a set of cards of that rank. Hoping to continue to be on a hot streak, the Argentinian player shared his intentions to participate in the long-awaited WSOP Main Event.
