Steve O'Dwyer Wins 2017 PokerStars Championship Macau Super High Roller

The 2017 PokerStars Championship Macau kicked into high gear this week with a number of exciting events. The largest tournament to wrap up over the weekend was the $400,000 HKD ($51,473 USD) buy-in no-limit hold’em super high roller. The tournament attracted a sizable field of 88 entries to create a prize pool equivalent to $4,349,820 USD. In the end the lion’s share of that was awarded to Steve O’Dwyer, who secured the title and the top prize of $8,460,830 HKD ($1,099,908 USD) after striking a heads-up deal with Fedor Holz.

This was O’Dwyer’s second title in the past fortnight, having won the PSC Panama $10,300 high roller on March 20. He has already made four final tables in 2017, cashing for $1,558,879 along the way. This latest score also earned him 816 Card Player Player of the Year points, enough to see him climb into tenth place in the overall POY standings, which are presented in 2017 by Commerce Hotel & Casino. His $17,482,332 in career live tournament earnings have moved him into 13th place on the all-time money list.

O’Dwyer entered the final day as the chip leader with 14 players remaining. Only the top 13 finishers made the money, which meant that a player had to come back to play after a night of rest only to be eliminated on the $87,880 bubble. Behzad Ahadpour was that unfortunate player, and with his elimination the remaining competitors all locked up a sizable payday.

O’Dwyer scored several eliminations as he made his way down to shorthanded play, including having his pocket eights hold up against Manig Loeser’s 103 to send the German to the rail in third place ($536,120 USD). At that point O’Dwyer held nearly a 4-to-1 chip lead over Fedor Holz. The two came to a deal that secured $8,160,830 HKD for O’Dwyer and $6,749,170 HKD ($877,392 USD) for Holz, leaving $300,000 HKD ($38,999) and the title to play for.

Holz earned 680 POY points at his third final table finish of the year. The 2016 Player of the Year race runner-up is once again in contention for the award, climbing to sixth place in the standings with 1,950 points and $1,398,285 in year-to-date earnings.

Here is a look at the payout and POY points awarded at this final table:

Photos provided by PokerStars / Neil Stoddart.

Related Articles

PokerStars Reveals All-New PokerStars Open

Venetian Launches Live Streams With CPPT In 2025

Venetian Rings In New Year With $1.1M DeepStack

Most Viewed Articles