Ben Tollerene Wins US Poker Open Event #5

Coming from behind to win a tournament seems to have become a trend at the 2018 US Open. Over the past couple of days, England’s Stephen Chidwick came back from having a short stack to win Event #3 of the USPO and repeated the same process to win Event #4 of the series.

A couple of hours back, we saw US high stakes poker player Ben Tollerene do something very similar in Event #5: The $10k NLHE, where he came back from a stack of less than 5 Big Blinds, to ship the tournament, beating quite a few pros on his way. Considered as an online cash game legend, 30-year old Tollerene pocketed $187,600 for finishing first in this event.

2018 has been good for Tollerene so far, having won one event and making the final table in another at the 2018 Lucky Hearts Poker Open. He has now followed up those performances with a win at the US Poker Open, taking his live poker earnings past the $5.5 million mark.

Tollerene wasn’t favourite to win until the very end, using up his quota of three allowed bullets right at the start of the tournament. However, he came back well to win the title, beating a total of 67-entries. His pocket Aces turned out to be too good for Schindler, when the latter shoved all-in with Q-9 and the table opened Q-7-3-6-2. Interestingly, all the final ten players in this event were from the United States.

“I wouldn’t come if the buy-ins weren’t big,” said Tollerene after shipping the tournament. However, this win wasn’t good enough to put him in the top 5 of the Championship standings. Jake Schindler, who finished 2nd in Event #5 for $134,000, has shot up to #2 on the Championship standings, still miles away from the leader Stephen Chidwick. 3 events to go!

USPO Championship standings: