Mikal Blomlie is the inaugural winner of the TonyBet Open Face Chinese World Championships after defeating Jan Hendrik Tapken, in heads-up action, to take the €35,000 first prize and the championship belt.
Mikal Blomlie is the TonyBet Open Face Chinese Champion of the World after taking the top accolade in the two-day €1,100 event in the Kings Casino, Prague.
“It’s always good to win a tournament, and I had a lot of fun,” Blomlie told TonyBet after his win. “I enjoy playing open-face Chinese, and I find it a fun and relaxing game.”
The victory was Blomlie’s second live OFC win after beating a field of 14 entrants to win a $770 OFC Pineapple event at the recent World Poker Tour National Series in the Philippines.
Blomlie plays most of his poker on PokerStars under the pseudonym ‘Mikal12345’. In 2012, he topped the World Championships of Online Poker (WCOOP) leaderboard, after cashing 15-times and securing two victories. His prize was a PCA package and he turned that into a 10th place finish for $120,000.
The TonyBet OFC World Championships were well received, and one assumes we will see them repeated at some time in the future. PokerStars Mindsports Ambassador, Jennifer Shahade, took the title in the €10,000 OFC High Roller event, and talking to PokerNews she said, “It was a pretty tough field but almost 100% of the field were heads-up players playing three-handed. The math and strategy is really different three-handed. We were all noobs and we had to think on our feet. The game will keep evolving and there will be a ton of new formats in the future.”
TonyBet OFC World Championships Results
1st. Mikal Blomlie – €35,000
2nd. Jan Hendrik Tapken – €21,000
3rd. Gary Stone – €12,750
4th. Oleg Udovenko – €9,430
5th. Maxim Panyak – €7,370
6th. Nikita Nikolaev – €5,800
7th. Alexander Lakhov – €4,750
8th. Jurgen Hellen – €3,830
9th. Andrii Nodieliaev – €3,060
10th. Mikalai Davidovich – €2,660
