Adam Foster Wins $154,958 in Empire State Main Event
Professional poker player Adam Foster ended up as the last man standing of the Empire State Championships 2013 after defeating a huge field of 426 poker players. Besides grabbing the championship title, he also collected a huge first-place prize of $154,958.
The event was the Empire State Poker Classic, a $1,650 buy-in annual poker tournament, which was played in New York’s prestigious Turning Stone Casino. The tournament was special this year as it celebrated the launch of a brand new TV poker show Poker Night in America (PNIA), which will be covering the event next year too.
Andy Rich and Todd Anderson, who bear the credit of producing the Heartland Poker Tour TV shows, created this TV show in collaboration with WSOP Media Director Nolan Dalla. The filming crew followed the poker pros as they headed over to upstate New York to participate in the event and even showed them playing private cash game with a $25/$50 limit and a buy-in as low as $5k.
The $1,500 Main Event at Turning Stone Casino attracted a large number of professional poker players, as a result of which a prize pool as large as $619,830 was created. Speaking about the filming of this event for the new Poker Night in America, Nolan Dalla said: “Our mission is to revolutionize televised poker. We want to make poker fun again, and that starts with bringing in some of the game’s most entertaining personalities and turning on the cameras all over the place, and capturing the magic that we all know happens, but we rarely see on television. We want this to be a real game-changer.”
A list of the most prominent professional poker players who turned up for the event were Eli Elezra, Mike Matusow, David Williams, Phil Laak, Gavin Smith, Greg Mueller, David Baker, Tom Schneider, Shaun Deeb, Matt Glantz, Will Failla, Dwyte Pilgrim, Amanda Musumeci, and Darvin Moon, the runner-up of the WSOP Main Event. Some of the players who finished in the cash, but couldn’t make it to the final table were Mike Matusow, who finished 14th; Justin Smith, who finished 42nd; David Baker, who finished 57th; and Phil Laak, who finished 23rd.
The final table comprised nine poker players, including the three pros who were originally selected by the producers of Poker Night in America—Darvin Moon who finished 8th, Matt Glantz who finished 6th, and Will Failla who finished 5th. Ultimately, it was Adam Foster who won the championship title after playing heads-up against Matt Parry.
Adam Foster returned home with the top pot of $154,958 while the runner up Matt Parry won $86,776. The players who finished third and fourth were Bud Salhob and David Johnston, who won $51,198 and $39,360, respectively. Will Failla and Matt Glantz finished fifth and sixth, scooping up pots of $32,851 and $26,000, respectively. The players who finished seventh and eighth were James Rubin and Darvin Moon, who won $20,144 and $13,946, respectively. Jason Knablo, the player who busted first at the final table, won $10,537.
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