HomeTAIPEI CITY, Taiwan – From a starting field of 60, Day 2 of the Asian Poker Tour (APT) Taiwan 2022 Main Event played down to the Final 8 runners with all but one of the foreign aspirants waylaid as the stage is now set for last battle for the championship tomorrow (3rd October) at the Chinese Texas Hold’em Poker Association (CTP Club) here.
It will be recalled that the 2021 version of this staging had the same result with Malaysia’s Kar Wee Chee managing to slip in, denying a Taiwanese shutout.
Before that, foreign campaigners were able to regularly infiltrate the final table and in several occasions even found a way to take down the crown like Cliff Chow of Hong Kong and China’s Zhou Yue Yang in 2019 along with Hamish Crawshaw of New Zealand in 2020.
The last time an all local Final 8 happened was in the 2017 APT Nouméa, New Caledonia Main Event where the last foreigner standing was American Jymmie Briggs, who busted out in ninth place.
The resulting Final 8 of this leg shows that Taiwan is becoming a dominant home turf unlike when it first hosted this series in early 2019 where only one local in Wang Wei Han represented the host nation in the finale. He finished eighth.
Heading into that last day of competition, Fang Po Wen–who won a side event and also made it to the Championship Event’s Final 8 during the recently concluded APT Philippines 2022–has the chip lead with 3,210,000 while the lone foreigner left standing in Nguyen Van Dai of Vietnam (actually a long time Taipei resident already) has 2,020,000. Occupying the not-so-distant third position is Guo Zhan Shuo with 2,005,000.
Overall chip-leader Fang Po Wen (TWN) is looking for his third APT trophy
Two of the three erstwhile chip-leaders also made it to the finale with Day 1A’s Wu Hao Kai (who also had the overall chip-lead at a certain point today) presently in sixth with 915,000 while Day 1B’s Guan Syun Chen is officially the shortest stack with only 375,000.
Andy Liu, the overall chip-leader to start Day 2 was sidelined at thirteenth place.
At this point, remaining players are now guaranteed NT$180,100.00 (US$5,660.00) but, of course, all eyes will be on the NT$1,440,900.00 (US$45,286.00) top prize.
The action commences at 7:00PM (UCT+8) and will be streamed fifteen minutes delayed on the APT Twitch channel.
Here at seat assignments coming into the finale:
This is the seating order of the Final 8 of the Main Event