Chile
LAPT6 Chile: Tavitian triumphs and averts the alarms
I was ready to sound the alarm. I hadn't started writing the recap, but I'd already alerted The Powers That Be to what was transpiring in Viña del Mar, Chile. Team PokerStars Pro Jose "Nacho" Barbero had the chip lead three-handed as he tried to secure his third LAPT title. That kind of thing doesn'...more
LAPT6 Chile: Tavitian shows Martins to the rail
At APPT7 Seoul last night, heads-up went for more than three hours before Aaron Lim accumulated all of the chips. It was a momentous struggle back and forth between Lim and Chane Kampanatsanyakorn. We thought we might be headed for a similarly long heads-up battle between Leonardo Martins and Pablo ...more
LAPT6 Chile: Barbero bounced in 3rd
Since the elimination of Jaime Zamanillo Mayol in 4th place, the final table has taken some twists and turns. Team PokerStars Pro Jose "Nacho" Barbero was cruising at that time, but things started going south quickly. He found himself playing many pots out of position against the reigning Brazilian ...more
LAPT6 Chile: Barbero passes Gordo's test
After all the early action, it seemed like today was going to be a short day for seven of the eight final table players. The eliminations of Sebastian Miranda, Alejandro Chokakis and Sergio Braga injected lots of life into the early stages of play.Then came the next two hours, where the pots were sm...more
LAPT6 Chile: Welcome to Cooler City
In an ideal world, poker final tables would be won by the most skillful player at the table. The game would be cat and mouse, a small pot here, a big bluff there, until one person had all the chips.We do not live in an ideal world, as Sergio Braga and Alejandro Chokakis can attest.Chokakis, a local ...more
LAPT6 Chile: Miranda first to fall
Sebastian Miranda started the day with 1.5 million in chips, a bit less than the final table average of 1.96 million. That stack put him in 5th place out of the 8 remaining players and comfortably ahead of the 8th-place player, Leonardo Martins (440,000).That wasn't enough to save Miranda from the N...more
LAPT6 Chile: The luck of the Irish
There I was this morning at my hotel breakfast buffet, minding my own business, eating pineapple and melon and drinking tea (as previously advertised). Through a window and out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman run down the street. I didn't think much about it until a second woman followed the f...more
LAPT6 Chile: Mayol leads; Barbero looks for Number Three
With all due respect to Jaime Zamanillo Mayol, the chip leader of final table of the 2013 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Chile National Poker Championship, this post is not going to be about him. I'm sure Sr. Mayol will understand. He was at the last two tables. He saw how Team PokerStars ...more
LAPT6 Chile: Man on fire
There is no smoke coming from the TV table, which is a damn curious thing. I would think that Team PokerStars Pro Jose "Nacho" Barbero would overheat from how quickly he's gobbling up chips and putting a stranglehold on the late stages of this LAPT Main Event.Let's start with the tale of the tape. W...more
LAPT6 Chile: A tale of two tables
It was the best of tables, it was the worst of tables, it was the age of run-good, it was the age of bad beats, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Champions, it was the season of Eliminations, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, the...more
LAPT6 Chile: Fantasy Land
For the last three days, Jose "Nacho" Barbero's eyes have been glued to either his poker table or his smartphone. Yesterday he said that playing five simultaneous games of Open-Face Chinese Poker on his phone helped him pass the time and not do anything crazy.Chinese therapyToday Barbero's stopped p...more
LAPT6 Chile: Easy game
When Leonardo Olivaros Ponce woke up this morning, he was in 21st chip position out of 31 players. His stack of 386,000 was about 7 big blinds short of the 31 big-blind average that would begin Level 21. It's a tricky stack size - too tall to open-shove, too short to get extremely creative. Ponce ma...more
LAPT6 Chile: The sun'll come out tomorrow
The last three days have been beautiful days in Viña del Mar. Every day, as the bloggers chowed down on lunch at La Barquera, a casino restaurant with a huge bank of curving windows looking directly out onto the Pacific Ocean, we lamented having to spend such nice days inside. Yesterday I spent the ...more
LAPT6 Chile: The Shuchleib surge
Anonymous poker hasn't become much of a "thing" yet in the world of online poker, but it's at least a gimmick that's currently out there. That gimmick was all I could think about as Victor Shuchleib moved almost a million and a half chips off the feature table to one of the outer tables just before ...more
LAPT6 Chile: Square the final table then square it again?
The most recent poker festival to take place in this part of the world was the Brazilian Series of Poker event at Iguaçu that finished on Tuesday. Two players from that final table winged their way southwest to Viña del Mar almost as soon as they received their payouts. Ariel Celestino earned about ...more
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