Tetsuya Tsuchikawa claims first trophy; Warm Up bags up with 18 left

Opening day of the Asian Poker Tour’s tenth event of the season, the APT Manila 2017, wrapped up at the Winford Hotel & Casino with Japanese pro Tetsuya Tsuchikawa claiming the first trophy of the festival. Tsuchikawa won the Ante Up for Charity event and earned his seventh title this year.

Ante Up for Charity Champion, Tetsuya Tsuchikawa

With this victory, Tsuchikawa added another qualifying point towards the Game of Champions. He leads the GOC with nine total trophies claimed (2 from APT Player of the Series wins) and is the current 2017 APT Player of the Year race leader.

The charity event had a late start with several players from the Main Event Warm Up (opening event), partaking in the game for a cause. Although there were only a total of 10 players that signed up, they pooled in a generous contribution of PHP 10,000 for the Save the Children organization. The collection will aid the Children of Marawi whose lives were badly affected by the five-month long urban warfare in the Philippines. Thank you to all the players that supported this important cause.

You can catch the final table action at the APT Twitch channel and the APT YouTube station.

Main Event Warm Up leaders

Today also saw 56 players for the Main Event Warm Up opener. Scheduled as a two-day event, 18 players closed the night with Malaysia’s Daniel Lim bagging up the largest stack of the bunch with 303,000 in chips.

Throughout the day, Lim was fairly quiet while Korea’s Sangmin Lee and Joon Won Lee took turns dominating the chip lead. The last level of the day saw Lim rise to the top rank which he held until bagging. Finishing up second in command was two-time APT Main Event champion Jeon Seung Soo with 237,000 and in third position was current APT Player of Year leader Tetsuya Tsuchikawa with 235,000.

The Main Event Warm Up will resume at 1pm tomorrow with players gunning for the lion’s share of PHP 150,500 out of the PHP 543,200 prize pool. Only 9 players will get paid with PHP 28,100 as the first cash payout.