Carlos Chang entered the final table of the 2012 APT Macau Main Event with a decent chip stack and a goal of outlasting the field. By the end of the tournament, Chang had crossed out everything in his to-do list.
Protect his stack? Check.
Build on his stack? Check.
Win the tournament? Check. Check. And Check.
The Taiwanese poker pro built up his stack one win at a time on his way to taking down the competition and winning the HKD$ 25,000 2012 APT Macau Main Event. For his efforts, Chang entered the APT’s history books as the fourth winner of the APT Macau Main Event. More importantly, he also lined his pockets with HKD$ 1,913,200 (USD 246,625).
The Main Event had its share of roller-coaster hands – par for the course in a tournament of this magnitude – with DafaPoker Ambassador Richard Zhu, the chip leader heading into the final table, falling on the short end of the stick most of the time. Incidentally, two of those times happened against Chang after the Taiwanese back-doored a full house and a flush on two separate occasions, severely cutting into Zhu’s chip stack. In the end, Zhu couldn’t recover from the bad beats, busting out in third place and pocketing HKD $478,300 in the process.
In the end, the title was down to Chang and Team Poker King Club player Winfred Yu. At this point, the former already had a dominating 7:1 chip ratio against the latter and it didn’t take long for Chang to go for the jugular. The inevitable final hand went down to a gutsy call by Chang (10d8d) on a board that showed a Jd10s4h flop. With Yu putting all his chips on the table with only a Qc4c, Chang made the call of his lifetime. When the turn showed Ad and the river flipped Js, it was all she wrote for Yu, who had to “settle” for second place a prize of HKD$ 1,016,400.
The rest of the final table saw Aaron Lim of Australia finishing fourth (HKD $358,700), followed by England’s Tom Alner (HKD $299,000), China’s Ai Min Zhang (HKD $239,200) and Yue Qing Zhou (HKD $179,400), Taiwan’s Yi Po Lee (HKD $122,600), England’s Sam Razavi (HKD $110,600), and Sweden’s Martin Nilsson (HKD $101,700) rounding out the Top 10.
