Two news stories from the World Poker Tour including Dhaval Mudgal winning the WPT Vietnam Main Event, and Adam Pliska vowing to support Vince Van Patten’s upcoming movie, A Walk to Vegas.
Yes, I married someone from Los Angeles.
Yes, it’s my fault (my heart’s, more accurately).
But it should be this hard.
Should it?
The woman who taught me that an umbrella could be a handy tool in a land without rain is beginning her third Visa process, and this time, there is a quiz thrown in with the £3k+ application fee.
She needs to prove to the UK Government that she knows everything about the heritage of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland or else they won’t let her in. Marriage to a UK citizen doesn’t matter nor that we donated 23 chromosomes each to a beautiful little girl born in Wales.
No, unless she can remember the history of the Tudors, all the Beatles’ number one hits, and why a guy called Hadrian decided to build a wall, we will be once again split apart Aristophane style, forced to travel the globe looking for a land a lot less suspicious of globalisation.
How about Vietnam?
The world may seem as fractured as its ever been, but the people of Vietnam don’t seem to care. In the early 1990s, the numbers of vietnamese suffering from extreme poverty hovered above the 70% mark, and today, it’s below 10%.
The remarkable turnaround is due to Vietnam becoming a hive of cheap, alternative labour, with China and the US the two primary countries swooping in with the cash to buy the products created by those cheap but talented hands.
According to Quartz, in 2017, Vietnam’s trade as a percentage of GDP reached over 200%, dwarfing the next best country, Thailand (122%). The Vietnamese have more money than ever before, making it a great time to host a poker tournament or two.
The World Poker Tour (WPT) has their ear to the GDP ground.
The team are currently in Vietnam for the first time, and the Main Event is a wrap. The VND 22,000,000 buy-in (USD 950) Main Event appealed to 528 people, 151 of which did their nuts, and came back for one more shot at the title.
“I can do it!”
All told, those passionate poker peeps parlayed a prizepool of VND 13,172,600,000 (USD 565,000) into the first prize of VND 2,4287,580,000 (USD 104,000), and it was India’s Dhaval Mudgal who beat Japan’s Takao Shimizu, heads-up, to take the title. It was the largest poker prizepool in Vietnamese poker history.
The three-day event, saw 15-players enter the final chapter, with Mudgal settled in second place. By the time the last nine took their sears, Mudgal was the chip leader, and despite facing a chip deficit when heads-up, he took the fifth title of his career and the most substantial payout of his career.
Here are the final table results in USD because all those noughts in the VND prices are giving me a headache.
Final Table Results
1. Dhaval Mudgal – $104,000
2. Takao Shimizu – $73,150
3. Tai Hsing Hsiung – $47,170
4. Tran Cao Tam – $34,483
5. Nguyen Duc Hai – $26,382
6. Hanh Phong – $21,077
7. Nguyen Hoang Nam – $17,459
8. Norbert Koh – $13,899
9. Dao Duc Phuong – $10,434
224 players are competing in the VND 44,000,000 (USD 1,884) buy-in WPT Vietnman High Roller, and there are some well-known faces in the final throes of that one including WPT Champions Club members, Marvin Rettenmaier and Dylan Wilkerson. Samantha Cohen also has chips.
WPT Partner With Vince Van Patten in Walk to Vegas
In other WPT news, the poker giant has agreed to become a partner in the upcoming film featuring their longtime commentator, Vince Van Patten.
Van Patten and Steve Alper co-wrote Walk to Vegas, a movie focusing on a prop bet made during a poker game that challenged the protagonist (Duke, played by Van Patten) to walk from Hollywood to Vegas in seven days. The pair of based the movie on a true story.
Joining Van Patten in the movie are WSOP bracelet winners Jennifer Tilly, Phil Laak, Antonio Esfandiari and Mike Sexton.
I imagine the WPT will support Vince by pumping out the trailer during WPT airtime.
Check it out for yourself.
