Amateur Wins APPT Auckland

An amateur poker player has won the PokerStars Asia Pacific Poker Tour Auckland Main Event, earning $257,040 NZD (£91,470). The total prize pool for this event was worth $856,000 NZD (£304,791) making it the biggest in New Zealand’s history and giving us a great headline of Amateur Wins APPT Auckland!

The winner was Daniel Craker, who had paid just $80 to enter the tournament via the satellite route, and his success has brought him a free seat at the Asia Pacific Poker Tour Sydney Grand Final, which will take place in December 2008.

Winning the largest ever poker prize pool in New Zealand is one thing, but doing it from a cheap satellite buy-in is quite another, and Daniel’s success will surely inspire plenty of other amateur online poker players to think big. Far too many online poker players start out with dreams of achieving high level success but then allow themselves to get sidetracked by a few bad beats. But as Daniel Craker has demonstrated (and Chris Moneymaker before him) all it takes is one particularly good run and you could well be on your way to all the poker success you desire.

For many big event winners, the head’s up stage can be the most gruelling, but for Daniel it went by very quickly with just two hands played. The final hand saw him going all-in against Matthew Konnecke with a pair of deuces. Konnecke called with As9s. The flop came down Kc, 10d, 6h and the last two cards were 5s and Qh. The deuces held up and made Daniel the winner of the biggest ever tournament in New Zealand.

Whilst Daniel Craker will no doubt be setting his sights on even bigger and better things in the future, his success should make all of us re-examine our own game. Are we giving ourselves the opportunities we need to land some big wins of our own, or have we become a little jaded? If the latter is the case, now might be a good time to roll up our sleeves and take the game a bit more seriously.