Aku Joentausta Wins HRW 03: $10,300 PLO High Roller, $1M GTD ($271,790)
HRW 03: $10,300 PLO High Roller, part of High Roller Week on GGPoker, came to a fitting end on Sunday night as Aku Joentausta, a regular at high-stakes PLO cash games on the site found himself the last player standing.
For getting through a field of 124 entries in the single-day, event, he claimed a reward of $271,790. The Finnish player had to get through the likes of Isaac Haxton, Leonid Yanovski and Ronny Kaiser at the final table, where he came in as the second-biggest stack after Lauri "KarilleMeni" Varonen.
Joentausta has about $1.2 million in live cashes but is most active online. In addition to his cash game exploits, he's a participant in high-stakes tournaments and cashed four times in the bracelet events on GGPoker this summer.
Official Final Table Results
| Place | Player | Country | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aku Joentausta | Finland | $271,790 |
| 2 | Andriy "smbcall911" Lyubovetskiy | Ukraine | $206,747 |
| 3 | Isaac Haxton | U.S.A. | $157,269 |
| 4 | Shyngis Satubayev | Kazakhstan | $110,633 |
| 5 | Ronny Kaiser | Switzerland | $91,003 |
| 6 | Leonid Yanovski | Israel | $69,224 |
| 7 | Lauri "KarilleMeni" Varonen | Finland | $52,658 |
| 8 | "WaterLover" | Canada | $40,056 |
| 9 | Adam Hendrix | U.S.A. | $30,470 |
For much of the day, the story was the dominance of Varonen, who had a monstrous lead of about three-times the next stack for hours on end.
That amazing run looked likely continue when he got in as a favorite with aces in a three-bet pot early at the final table. He was fading a flopped flush draw on a paired board, and a hold would mean having 40% of the chips eight-handed. However, Canadian account "WaterLover" managed to hit a spade on the river and make it anyone's game.
Such was the topsy-turvy nature of the endgame that Andriy "smbcall911" Lyubovetskiy, who came into the final nine as the shortest stack with less than 10 big blinds, actually took the chip lead without anyone going bust.
However, Joentausta asserted himself with a big calldown against WaterLover holding top pair of aces on a paired board where WaterLover raised preflop and blasted off with air to go out eighth and leave Joentausta in the lead.
It was a lead Joentausta wouldn't relinquish until heads-up play, after he'd made another big bluff-catch against Haxton, who failed to muscle him off top pair of aces on a paired board again, though Joentausta did river a backdoor flush as well.
Lyubovetskiy did manage to grab the lead after he got lucky all in on the turn as an underdog, but a few hands later, Joentausta closed him out after taking back-to-back three-bet pots, the second sealing the deal when kings and a flush draw held against a pair of queens and a gutshot.