Cambodia’s inaugural Asian Poker Tour Asian Series event wrapped up in Bavet town yesterday with Vietnam’s Ha Duong winning the $1,100 buy-in main event at the Las Vegas Sun Casino.

One hundred fifteen players created a total of 714 entries into 17 different events, which Tournament Manager Jason Morris hailed as encouraging for the development of the sport in the Kingdom.

“We had a very successful event considering poker is very new in Bavet and are definitely looking at returning next year,” Morris told the Post.

The APT Asian Series hosts regular tournaments across the Asian-Pacific region, with the aim of promoting professional poker in places relatively new to the game. It features lower buy-ins and smaller fields than the two annual events run by its parent company, the Asian Poker Tour, in Macau and Manila.

The field in the main event in Bavet consisted of 122 players, who contributed to a prize pool of $134,200. Only 49 won their way through to Monday’s day two, with Ha Duong as the early chip leader.

Many well-known names from the Tour turned out for the pioneering tournament, including a majority of front-runners for the APT Player of the Year award such as current leader of the standings Liam John Anderson of Australia and Englishman Samad Razavi, five points off the pace in second.

Underdog Ha Duong never surrendered his stack advantage on Monday and finished with double the chips of his nearest rival, Germany’s Jan-Eric Schwippert.

These two players emerged from the eight-player final table to play heads up to determine the tournament winner. Ha Duong dominated to take winner’s cheque of $30,200 and 400 points that thrust him to 18th on the APT Player of the Year ladder.

Runner-up Schwippert picked up $17,700 and 300 ranking points to move to 33rd.

Over the course of the year, nine ranking events have been held in the Philippines, Mauritius, China, India, Macau, Cambodia and a special tournament in London. The overall winner at the end of the Tour will be awarded $8,000 in buy-ins for future APT events plus a winner’s trophy.

The APT Asian Series’s next and final stop will be aboard the floating casino boat anchored on the Mandovi River in Goa, India, from December 3 to 9, with many side events and a 150,000-rupee ($2,713) buy-in main event.

The APT Asian Series is open to all players with money to enter.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Derbuc at [email protected]