PokerStars Festival Korea - a battle among the pros

Currently, the PokerStars Festival is being played out in Korea. The first ever Asian event is currently taking place at Korea's newest luxury gaming resort at Paradise City in Incheon.

Key Dates and Event Information

The PokerStars Festival opened on 14 July with an open tournament. The guaranteed prize pot that day was 50,000,000 KWR. From July 16 to 19, players from across the globe enjoyed PokerStars' Super Deep. A number of events are still being played out, the PokerStars Main Event started on 20 July and is expected to finish on 24 July, as is the PokerStars Cup and NLH - Megastack. With a combined guaranteed prize pool of 58,750,000, the buy-in option to the event was well worth it - at least for some.

PokerStars player advances in the tournament

With few days to go, the main event at the PokerStars Festival Korea is being dominated by numerous strong players, including PokerStars' Celina Lin and Randy Lew. On Day 1c, PokerStars' Randy "Nanonoko" Lew was one of 38 players who managed to successfully progress through 12 levels of play. This, however, didn't come easy for the PokerStars' player who had to overcome a major slip-up in the concluding stages.

Throughout the day, Lew was playing well. He appeared to hold an above average stack until Lew held ace-king against Yang Zhang's pocket jacks and a short-stacked player got in with king-queen. This meant that some of Lew's equity was blocked and Lew was left with less than 20 big blinds.
Lew, however, was able to recover and bagged 52,700 on the day, coming in 159th in the main event. This comes after landing the 5th place at the PokerStars High Roller event, cashing in on $17,552.

Celina Lin, also sponsored by PokerStars, was not quite as successful as her teammate. She made a weak call against a player with jack-ten. This cost her most of her chips early on and she was unable to recover from the poor move.

Favourite Zhang in top form

Zhang is amongst the most experienced and accomplished players at this year's PokerStars Festival in Korea. On day 1c, Zhang made it into the top five of 120 players.
Scott Janik came at number one with 215,800, followed by Naohito Tamaya, Masatoshi Tanaka, Hiroyuki Noda and Zhang. Janik played strong cards on day 1c; yet, Zhang may recover. Zhang with just under $1 million in live cash has won immense prizes and has refined his skills in recent months. Zhang spent the majority of his summer in Las Vegas, where he scooped the four amounts of cash at WSOP and won another one at Venetian.

Cannot get enough poker action?

Regardless of who will take the top prize in Korea, the competition will continue throughout the coming months. The next location in the PokerStars' series is Manila. From 28 July until 7 August, the best players in the world will flock to Manila's City of Dreams Casino where huge guaranteed prize pools await.