Brian Rast Wins Inaugural $500,000 Super High Roller Bowl for $7,525,000
The inaugural $500,000 Super High Roller Bowl started with 43 entrants, but on Sunday just seven players, who had each locked up a part of the $21.5 million prize pool, returned to battle down to a winner. It took the better part of 10 hours, but in the end it was Brian Rast who walked away with the $7.525 million first-place prize and a championship ring.
In doing so, Rast, who was recently the subject of a PokerNews feature story, notched the fourth seven-figure score of his career. His first came in 2011 when he won the World Series of Poker $50,000 Poker Players' Championship for $1,720,328, and then a year later he took sixth in the inaugural Big One for ONE DROP for $1,621,333. More recently, he took home $1,083,500 for winning the World Poker Tour Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic High Roller in December 2013. Obviously this was his biggest score by a large margin, and vaults him into 11th place on the all-time money list.
It took awhile for things to heat up at the final table, but on Hand #39, which took place in Level 18 (30,000/60,000/10,000), Scott Seiver raised to 150,000 from the hijack and Erik Seidel three-bet shoved from the cutoff for 870,000. Seiver called.
Seiver:
Seidel:
The flop came down , giving Seidel the lead with aces and queens. However, the turn fell to give Seiver a set of sevens. The river was the , no help to Seidel, ending his tournament in seventh place for $860,000.
Tom Marchese was the next to go. First he was crippled after running Big Slick into the pocket kings of Timofey "Trueteller" Kuznetsov, and on the very next hand got it in with the and was up against the of David Peters. The board ran out and that was all she wrote for Marchese.
Not long after, the cards turned against Peters and he watched his chips dispersed around the table. Eventually he shoved his last 1.255 million holding the only to run into the of Connor Drinan. The board ran out and Peters took his leave in fifth place.
After the dinner break, Kuznetsov hit the rail when he flopped top pair only to run into Seiver's set of nines, and then three-handed play stretched on until pocket eights wreaked havoc twice within five hands. The first saw Seiver use them to crack Rast's kings and double, and then Rast found them to crack queens and send Drinan to the rail in third place.
Seiver began heads-up play with a 2-1 chip lead over Rast, but one big hand saw the stacks flip. Then on Hand #173 of the final table, which took place in Level 23 (80,000/160,000/20,000), the two ended up flipping for the title when Seiver got his stack all in preflop holding the against the of Rast. The flop gave Rast the lead, and he held onto it as the blanked on the turn followed by the on the river.
The $500,000 Super High Roller Bowl Final Table Results
Place | Player | Prize |
1 | Brian Rast | $7,525,000 |
2 | Scott Seiver | $5,160,000 |
3 | Connor Drinan | $3,225,000 |
4 | Timofey Kuznetsov | $2,150,000 |
5 | David Peters | $1,505,000 |
6 | Tom Marchese | $1,075,000 |
7 | Erik Seidel | $860,000 |
Congratulations to Brian Rast, the inaugural $500,000 Super High Roller Bowl champion!