Corey Kempson Leads Final 13 Players in The Star Sydney Champs Main Event

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Aug 04, 2019 3 min read

Day 2 of The Star Sydney Champs Main Event has come to an end after a tumultuous eleven levels of play. At the start of the day, 123 players out of 600 entries returned to the felt to battle it out to claim their share of the A$1,680,000 prize pool as only 63 players would be cashing. At the end of the day, only 13 players made their way through. Leading the field into the final day is Corey Kempson with 3,115,000.

Kempson is no stranger to going deep in tournaments but has actually never won the final all-in to claim the title in any of them. With 12 final table appearances, his best ever live cash is worth $182,835 when he came 2nd in Melbourne once. Right now, he has guaranteed a cash of at least A$21,470 but will have his sights set on the first-place prize of A$352,800.

Final Day Seat Draw

When the players returned to The Star Poker room, Chris Moussa was the first of many players to leave the feature table stage. Errolyn Strang, the 2011 Sydney Champs Main Event champion, lost most of her chips when she had Nicholas Woodhams covered when all the chips went in on the six-eight-seven flop with two clubs. Woodhams had a flush draw against Strang’s aces and got there on the turn. In the end, she lost all her chips against Wenjian Giu when she flopped an open-ended straight draw but against Qiu’s top pair. She turned a pair but bricked the river to try and become a double winner.

The bubble

Joe Antar eliminated Navid King and Carlos Gonzalez in the same hand with 66 players showing on the clock. Initially, the tournament staff announced that everyone was in the money but when play had resumed, the floors discovered there was a discrepancy and there were still 64 players left. This caused some commotion as hand-for-hand play was still needed as the bubble had not burst.

In the end, it would still be Antar who would really burst the bubble as he eliminated Salvatore Fazzino. Antar raised and Fazzino defended his big blind to see the jack-five-five flop come. Fazzino then check-called another bet of Antar to do the same again on the trey on the turn. The river was the third five for Fazzino to check-call Antar’s shove with the bigger stack. Antar held nine-five for quad fives while Fazzino had pocket jacks for the flopped full house.

The money stages

Once the bubble had burst, the “all-in and calls” could be heard from all corners of the poker room and players made their way by the wayside, including Day 1b chip leader Cezary Klimczak, who fell to Mark Lassau when he held jack-ten and was up against the ace-queen. Lassau ended up bagging 1,340,000 in chips.

Overnight chip leader Kempson started his climb to the top of the counts when he first doubled through Nickolas Oiberman with pocket tens, he then eliminated Tony Nardi, Brian O’Farrell, Con Angelakis, Sam Vakili, and Chris Kittos. The last one fell in fourteenth place after shoving his ace-ten into Kempson's kings.

Three hands later it was time for all players to tag their bags and go to bed to battle it out on Monday at 12:30 p.m. local time until there is one player left. When they return, play will resume with Level 23 which features a small blind of 20,000, big blind of 40,000, and an ante of 5,000. Level duration will still be 60 minutes with a 10-minute break after every two levels.

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