The popular Aussie Millions, or the Australian Championship of Poker, features an iconic series of poker tournaments taking place at Melbourne’s Crown Casino. The Main Event of the series is the biggest poker event of the Southern Hemisphere thanks to its prize pool that usually exceeds A$7 million.
The very first tournament was held in June of 1997. At the time, the main event featured a buy-in of $1,000. It was a Limit Hold’em tournament which gathered 74 players, generating a prize pool of $74,000. As the event became widely recognized, its prize pools grew bigger and bigger and it attracted hundreds of entries.
Then, in January of 2003, the event went international and at the time it gathered a player field of 125 and a prize pool of $1.2 million. When it comes to the 2020 edition of the event, its much-anticipated Main Event has reached an ending and it was excellent Vincent Wan who took the first-place prize home.
Vincent “Wonky” Wan Taking Home A$1.3 Million
The final day of the event would take fifteen hours to complete and it would take four hundred and fourteen hands before Vincent Wonk Wan was crowned the winner. This was a true marathon for the three remaining players including the ultimate winner Vincent Wan, Ngoc Tai Hoang, and Gareth Pepper.
Once the tournament came down to three players, the trio decided to discuss a deal. Later on, an agreement was made between Wan and Hoang who were very close in chips at this point with Wan having 9.8 million in chips and Hoang slightly over 10.5 million.
Gareth Pepper would be guaranteed around A$1 million with his chip stack of 4.2 million. Once the deal was in place, Gareth Pepper was eliminated from the event as third-placed. Hoang and Wan then faced off in super exciting heads up play. This round lasted over four hours before Vincent Wonky Wan claimed the victory. Vincent Wan won three showdowns and gained the lead to finally win the tournament around four a.m. in the morning.
Needless to say, both Wan and Hoang were extremely tired and the final hand went down with Vincent Want winning with 10-9 against Ngoc Tail Hoang’s A-3. The Main Event of the 2020 Aussie Millions has been a huge success especially for Vincent Wan, Ngoc Tail Hoang, and Gareth Pepper who thanks to their deal took home A$1,318,000, A$1,318,000 and A$1,000,000 respectively. The fourth-placed was Nino Ullmann who won A$480,160 followed by Erik Seidel and his prize of A$378,660, Oliver Weis who won A$307,820 and seventh-placed Nicolas Malo who won A$240,080.
The 2020 Aussie Millions Concluded
This year’s Aussie Millions has been a great success with the poker tournaments series kicking off earlier in January at the iconic Crown Melbourne. The series included twenty-three championship events and with a number of winners crowned including Kahle Burns who won the 100,000 Challenge and took home a prize of A$1,746,360, Jussi Nevanlinna who won the Event Event #10 among seventy players and took home A$51,975 followed by Andrew Kelsall and David Steicke.
As reported, Jo Snell won the opening event while on the 10th of January we also saw Freek Scholten winning Event #4. Event #3 brought the biggest success to Matthew Edwards who was crowned the ultimate winner and took home A$83,000.
