Event #5, a $200 + $20 Deepstack Freezeout, started at 11:00am, featuring a 30,000 chip starting stack and 20 minute levels. Although the weather was not the best today, 113 players made the trip to Playground to enjoy a Sunday afternoon of tournament poker. There was a guaranteed prize pool of $15,000 that ended up swelling to $21,922!
There were many local grinders mixed in with out of town players competing for a top prize of $5,252. The day played out slowly, with many players grinding similar sized stacks. Cameron Wilson from Kitchener, Ontario, had started to run away from the pack in the later stages. Mike Saragossi then started to build a monster stack heading into the final table. Ahmad Baalbaki was playing patiently, nursing a below average sized stack as we were down to the last 3 tables. he never gave up hope and was able to take a seat on the final table. After winning the huge hand against Mike Saragossi, it was almost impossible to stop him. Altough he was relatively card dead for a few hours through the afternoon, he was able to pick up some key hands when it really mattered on the finally table.
On the last hand of play, David Cadoch was short stacked so it looked like Ahmad was trying to take advantage of David as he had just shoved his monster stack. David decided to call it off and the hands were tabled:
Ahmad:
David:
With a board, David exited in 2nd place and we had our Event #5 champion.
1st place: Ahmad Baalbaki, $4,942