Blind Bet Decides the Winner of Asia Pacific Poker Tour in Macau

Poker Stars inaugural 2012 Asia Pacific Poker Tour’s Asia Championship of Poker main event was won by Xing Zhou. The Chinese poker
player finished first in a 184 participant strong competition in over five days.

Zhou was going into heads-up with Ying Kit Chan, a Hong Kong Chinese. Although Zhou secured a substantial chip lead of 4,860,000 to 664,000, the two finalists played over six hours to determine the overall winner.

Chan eventually managed to fight his stack back up to be relatively even with Zhou. Then Zhou took the lead again with about 3.3 million chips to Chan’s 2.2 million.

The two had uneven stacks after six hours, when they decided to have a truly high roller bet to decide on the final winner. The gamblers agreed to go blind to determine who would come out as winner of the final battle, thus the whole Chinese poker tournament.

Neither of them looked, and they were allowed to keep their hole cards face down until the river. After this, each player revealed one card at a time. Finally, Zhou’s straight beat Chan’s hand.

Zhou had the larger stack and was declared as the winner of APPT Macau: Asia Championship of Poker. Each of the final two players received an equal HKD $3,547,500 in prize money, but the APPT champion title went to Zhou. Xing Zhou is reigning in poker in Macau for a year.

The final table results and winnings according to Chinese gambling news are:

1 Xing Zhou (China): HKD 3,547,500 ($454,807)

2 Ying Kit Chan (Hong Kong): HKD 3,547,500 ($ 457,807)

3 Michael Kanaan ( Australia): HKD 1,731,000 ($ 221,923)

4 Jacques Zaicik (France): HKD 1,384,000 ($ 177,436)

5 Alan Sass (United States): HKD 1,125,000 ($ 144,23)

6 Tsugunari Toma (Japan): HKD 952,000 ($ 122,051)

7 Andrew Hinrichsen (Australia): HKD 779,000 ($ 99,872)

8 Tom Alner (UK): HKD 606,000 ($77,792)

9 Henry Wang (Taipei Chinese): HKD 432,700 ($55,474)