APT Taipei back with largest-ever festival
The Asian Poker Tour has put together one of the largest, most comprehensive poker festival schedules the region has ever seen. APT Taipei 2024, which runs from 28 February through 10 March, boasts 105 trophy events and over TWD 150 million ($4.8 million) in prize pool guarantees!
The event schedule is so vast that APT Taipei 2024, in partnership with the Chinese Texas Hold’em Poker Club, runs across two venues: the CTP Asia Poker Arena and the Chinese Mahjong League in central Taipei.
APT festivals are always busting with dozens of tournaments across a variety of formats and disciplines, but APT Taipei promises to be 20 percent longer than any of the APT stops from 2023! APT Taipei 2024 will be an epic grind.
The crown jewel of the APT Taipei 2024 festival is, without doubt, the Main Event. The Main Event commands a TWD 70,000 ($2,270) buy-in, and features a guarantee on its prize pool worth an impressive TWD 65 million ($2 million). If the 2023 APT Taipei Main Event is anything to go by, the 2024 edition should blow that guarantee out of the water.
Last May, 1,434 players bought into the APT Taipei 2023 Main Event, creating a prize pool more than double the size of the advertised guarantee; the Main Event paid TWD 62,594,100 ($2,034,185).
Some 203 players received a payout instead of 201 because Ping Hsien Chan, Hiroki Kato, and Hon Cheong Lee busted during the same hand on the bubble.
Others who saw a return on their investment included Kannapong Thanarattrakul, Belarmino De Souza, Abhinav Iyer, Joshua McCully, and Kitty Kuo.
Each of the nine players who reached the final table locked in the equivalent of $26,762, with the top four finishers getting their hands on a six-figure (USD) payday.
Thailand’s all-time leading money earner Punnat Punsri was the last player standing. Punsri defeated South Korea’s Soo Kim heads-up to capture a TWD 11,210,400 ($364,315) prize, the seventh-largest haul of Punsri’s career. It is highly likely that Punsri will be in attendance for the 2024 APT Taipei Main Event, which is bad news for whoever finds themselves on his table.
The lone bright spot for the Philippines was the sixth place finish of Lester Edoc who cashed in NT$1,982,700 or roughly USD 64,433.
Making waves
Under new ownership since 2022, the Asian Poker Tour has been making big waves in the poker world, consistently hosting record-breaking events at nearly every stop. Its 2023 Taiwan leg set the tone, paying out a grand total NT$ 229,174,757 (~USD 7.36 million), the highest among all touring brands in Asia. The Main Event, in particular, stood out, amassing a record NT$ 62,594,100 (~USD 2 million).