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Yasheel Doddanavar leads APPT Korea Short Deck FT

One of Asia’s renowned poker tours, Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT), owned and operated by the worldwide brand PokerStars LIVE, began 2019 APPT Korea in Incheon. The series also has Short Deck as one of its offerings, a popular format that’s building up the hype in recent months. The format was first introduced on large-scale in the live scene by Triton Poker.

The KRW 1 million Short Deck drew in a total of 62 entries (including 23 re-entries) to the felts at Paradise City Casino in Incheon. Day 1 of the 7^th event of the series brought the prize pool to KRW 54,126,000 and the top 7 places will receive a pay-check. The tournament reached the Final Table on the first day itself and leading the pack was India’s Yasheel Doddanavar with a stack of 3,530,000 chips. He finished higher than Thai pro Phachara Wongwichit, who has 835,000 chips to his name.

Doddanavar was playing in the APPT National yesterday and was above average in chip counts entering the day but busted on the following day yesterday. He still has an incredible chance at winning the Short Deck and if he does, he’ll be the proud Indian to have bagged the first title in this series, as well as the first-place cash prize of KRW 17,862,000 (~INR 10.85 Lakhs). The closest player after him is Long Chun Pang with 2 million chips, not a grave threat by any means for Doddanavar.

Short Deck is a format which uses only the cards valued 6 and above from a standard deck. Traditionally, Indians hardly play this format, being used to the NLHE and to a certain extent PLO. Very rarely do you find Indian players participating in Short Deck tournaments overseas, let alone toppping the FT chip counts, which makes Doddanavar’s run all the more impressive so far.

Final Table Chip Counts –

1. Yasheel Doddanavar – 3,530,000
2. Long Chun Pang – 2,000,000
3. Tsun Ming Chan – 1,380,000
4. Phachara Wongwichit – 835,000
5. Randy Lew – 665,000
6. Hao Qi Xie – 615,000
7. Xiaosheng Zheng – 335,000

Notable players in the run but who didn’t make it in the above list included Malaysian pro and Natural8 Team Hot member Michael Soyza, APPT ME champion Wilson Lim and others. Short Deck FT play will start today at 1.30 pm local time in Incheon so stay tuned to GutshotMagazine.com for more such tournament round-ups and for general poker news from around the world.

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