Daniel Alaei Grabbed the WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic Title

The Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker classic has earned another winner. Daniel Christopher Alaei grabbed the coveted seat surviving the rigid battle against 328 players. He won an enormous prize of $1.4 million on the said event.

Alaei specializes on NLHE cash games and has already collected more than $3.7 million dollars in live games during his poker career. He has 2 WSOP bracelets to his name and had won the $10,000 World Championship Omaha Hi/Lo 8-or-better event and made 18 cashes in the WSOP earning him an amount of $1,533,917 respectively.

On the first day of the WPT event that had a $15,000 buy-in he joined the side tables, leaving the first set of plays behind. “I signed up to play and some guys were starting up a big cash game,” Alaei thought. “So, I played in that over the tournament for the rest of the day.”

When the time for the final table to be played, Daniel came up with very competitive competitors on his table and that includes Josh Arieh, Faraz “The-Toilet” Jaka, Shawn Buchanan, Scotty Nguyen, and Stephen “MrTimCaum” O’Dwyer.

Fives times WSOP bracelet winner, Scotty Nguyen, was trying to gain his previous fame by taking the chance to win the WPT title. However, he ended up as 5th and taking home $249,976. Nguyen gained praises from his co-players and he commented:

“Everybody is a good player these days. You’ve got to respect that. All these young kids these days, they come in to play and they have nothing to fear. They have nothing to lose, only gain.”

The hardest part of the game for Alaei was when he was head to head with 2 time WSOP winner Josh Arieh. They played a good deal of cards before the final hand that decided it all appeared. Arieh holds 7 pockets and the flop is 10-2-5. He placed all his money on the pot post-flop. Then Alaei made a call with a 10, 8 card. Alaei won with the hand and Arieh went home $952,290 richer.

“It was not an easy call for me,” Alaei stated. “If he had a 10, I was pretty much dead.”

Daniel Alaei took home $1,428,430 for his winnings. He was asked about what it felt to win his first WPT title and he said, “This is great. I’ve wanted one of these for a while. I was one of my only friends who didn’t have one.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 5:47 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.