Will “The Thrill” Failla can lay claim to being THE legend when it comes to live poker. The New York native picked up his seventh title of all-time by taking down the World Poker Tour (WPT) Legends of Poker $3,500 NLHE Main Event in Los Angeles. The event was part of the WPT’s tenth season, or season X, and took place at the city’s Bicycle Casino. 757 players wanting to become a legend meant that the prize pool rose to $2,570,015, an increase of $250,000 compared with last year. Fox Sports Net filmed the final table where it will be screened in early 2012. There you will see “The Thrill” pick up his prize of $758,085 and everything else that went down on the final table. Unfortunately what happens in LA doesn’t necessarily stay in LA.
The Italian Poker Tour’s (IPT) latest event reached the final table with a Ukrainian leading the field. 28-year-old Vitalii Minakov sits atop the pile with 1,671,000 chips as he does for the first prize of €150,000 in Novi Gorica – across the Italian border in Slovenia. It will be the second time that Minakov has made a final table at the IPT after picking up 7th place at the San Remo event only months ago.
The closest homegrown challenger is Domenico Cordi on 1,213,000 chips and one of the only ones in the entire field to have registered a victory on this tour (IPT Campione 2011). Marco Leonzio (1,015,000) shouldn’t be discounted as he has an impressive record in various European Poker Tour events over recent years.
