The Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) has achieved a breakthrough success at Brazil by attracting a field of 536 players — a huge leap from last year’s 398 players, a 35% increase to be exact. As such, the prize pool soared to more than a million dollars, with the first prize amounting to a whopping $369,504 – a prize won by Alex Manzano, a poker player from Chile.
Record-Breaking
It’s always very exciting when poker breaks new ground, especially when tournaments in various parts of the world experience greater success each year. The LAPT, a poker tournament series sponsored by PokerStars, has always been widely popular among players. But this year, the number of people who signed up for the LAPT Brazil literally soared. The tournament organizers were pleasantly surprised to find that more than 500 people turned up for the tournament, which had a buy in of $2,500 per person. Of course, the field soon dwindled down to the last eight players who would make up the tournament’s final table. They all fought fiercely to stay in the game, but the field had to be narrowed down.
The Final Table
When the final table play began, there were actually a lot of little problems. The power at the casino kept on going out, and there were several delays that inspired the irk of quite a lot of players. In the end, it took more than two hours before the play could actually begin. When it did, though, there was simply no stopping it. The first one to go was Bruno Politano, who entered the final table with the third shortest stack. He was eliminated by Alex Manzano. Following Politano was Henrique Bernardes. Bernardes actually had the shortest stack when final table play began, so he was already at a great disadvantage. Following him was Santiago Nadal. What happened next was a bit ironic. Leandro Csome was the one who entered the final table as chip leader. He had more than 2.8 million chips. However, he lost the bulk of it to Joao Neto.
He never really recovered after that and was ousted in 5th place by Manzano despite his earlier lead. Marcio “Kamikase” Motta was the one eliminated in 4th place, this time by Neto. Neto had more than seven million chips after that, which gave him a pretty comfortable lead. Manzano did an amazing turn around though, by eliminating Fonseca in a very pivotal hand. In the end, it was Manzano and Neto battling it out in heads up play. Manzano had a 2:1 chip lead – which was all he needed to finish the game, right after only three short hands.
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