After emerging battered and bruised from the longest final table in tour history, it was Full Tilt pro Steve Brecher who outshone the Shooting Stars to seal victory at the WPT’s Bay 101 pit stop.
After a gruelling 12 hours of final day play and some 319 competitive hands of poker, retired software developer-turned Full Tilt-sponsored pro Steve Brecher finally put an end to his WPT title drought by defeating tour mainstay Kathy Liebert heads-up to take home over $1 million.
Brecher, making the ninth cash of an illustrious WPT career, eventually sealed victory when his shove with A-9 survived an almighty scare after being called by Liebert’s Qs-10s. Ahead going to the flop, Brecher must have been decidedly more nervous when the first three cards rolled out 6s-6d-2s to make his opponent a slight favourite in the hand, but he managed to fade a queen, ten or spade on both the turn and river to win the first major title of his professional career.
Having knocked on the door for so long, Brecher was obviously delighted to have broken his WPT hoodoo, but as a result of the punishing length of the final table, the Reno native’s celebrations were somewhat muted. “I’m ecstatic,” Brecher assured reporters. “I’m not generally that much of an animated guy, but I’d be much more animated now if I hadn’t just played for twelve-and-a-half hours!”
KATHY COME HOME
The result must have been a bitterly disappointing blow for Liebert, meanwhile, as she vied to become the first woman in WPT history to win an event at the sixth final table of her career on the tour. And as if narrowly missing out on such an accolade wasn’t bad enough, being the only remaining Shooting Star bounty in the tournament, Liebert was forced to suffer the final indignity of handing over an autographed t-shirt to her heads-up conqueror. One can only hope that the $550,000 she received for 2nd place made the whole experience slightly more palatable.
To make matters more frustrating for Liebert, she’d held the chip lead a couple of hours previously before a huge suck-out by Brecher during three-handed play had knocked the wind out of her sails and put the Full Tilt pro in the driving seat. With the pair getting it all-in pre-flop and Liebert’s A-K holding a dominating lead over Brecher’s A-Q, her opponent was left staring down the barrel of tournament elimination until he turned a miraculous broadway straight to storm back into contention.
“[Sucking out] is nothing to be proud of, but that’s the way it happened and I’m pleased to accept the result,” confessed Brecher. “It was the most critical hand of the day, but I can console myself with the fact that it was the only time I sucked out after the money went in during the entire tournament.”
RECORD BRECHER
And while no one would argue with Brecher’s claims in what had been a typically solid and focussed performance from the tournament veteran, he certainly had the rub of the green in some other ways. Indeed, Brecher only booked his final table berth when his pocket aces held up against the kings of three-time WSOP bracelet winner Farzad Bonyadi on the tournament’s penultimate day.
That cooler had ensured that he began play sharing the chip lead with Bay Area resident Tony Behari, while locals Chau Vu and Thao Le started the final table as the obvious short-stacks. And sure enough, the two players were unable to mount any sort of comeback as they both exited the competition within the space of three hands. First to go was Vu, whose last-ditch shove with A-8 proved ill-timed as he ran into the pocket eights of Behari, with a K-J-10-9-3 board providing no help to send him packing in sixth.
A few moments later, he was joined on the rail by Le after the Californian attempted to slow-play pocket queens against Liebert only to find the 2004 bracelet-winner holding bullets. After check-calling Liebert’s bet on a 5-2-2 board, an 8 on the turn prompted Le to lead out and ultimately shove over the top of his opponent’s re-raise, but Liebert snap-called with aces to end his title hopes.
As all this was going on, Chris Moore had been chipping up while Behari was doing a good job of undoing all of the hard work he’d put in over the previous four days to arrive at the final table in joint first place. Having already run a stone-cold bluff into Liebert’s full house, Behari proved that he hadn’t learned his lesson by moving all-in over the top of Moore’s raise with Kh 8h, and Liebert was on hand again to finish the job, this time holding pocket tens as the board bricked out.
It was only then that Brecher’s tournament-changing hand with A-Q managed to halt Liebert in her tracks, and soon after his rivered flush eliminated Moore in third place to ensure that he took a 2.5-to-1 chip lead into heads-up play. That lead ballooned to as much as 7-to-1 before the final blow was landed and, after shaking off the fatigue of the gruelling encounter, Brecher was able to reflect on a job well done.
“I was just able to stay focused and keep out of trouble," he said after collecting his title. "On occasions in the past I have made dumb plays, but I was able to avoid that this time. I was able to play my A-game which, with a little bit of luck, was good enough to win."
Final Table Payouts
1st: Steve Brecher $1,025,500
2nd: Kathy Liebert $550,000
3rd: Chris Moore $291,500
4th: Tony Behari $230,000
5th: Thao Le $180,000
6th: Chau Vu $135,000 |
