O'Dwyer win a $5,000 buy-in Bellagio event two weeks ago

The Epic Poker League’s $1,590 buy-in Pro-Am was pitched as a chance for your average Joe poker player to pick up one of the nine temporary cards to take part in the $20,000 buy-in member only Main Event. It may have been a sot for amateurs, but it was the pros who dominated the action, including the event’s winner , Steve O’Dwyer, who has been a longtime presence on the tournament circuit, but missed out on making the Season 1 cut.

“It was kind of a bummer that I wasn’t going to be able to be involved in [Epic] unless I won a seat.  I wasn’t even planning on being here to play this, I was going to go to Estonia for the EPT.”

Thankfully he decided to stick around in Vegas and take a shot in the satellite event, something O’Dwyer cites as a strong suit of him.

“I have the sickest ROI of satellites of all time,” O’Dwyer jokes.  ”The one thing I have consistently won at is satellites.”  He isn’t kidding either.  O’Dwyer has won high buy-in seats in everything from the WPT Championship to the PCA to EPT London’s High Roller event.  In an event where the final table bubble was worth almost as much as first place prize money, O’Dwyer was well suited to succeed and did just that, picking up a Main Event seat and $23,810.

In the weeks leading up to the Epic Poker League’s big debut at the Palms, the questions around the poker world ranged from how many people would show up for the $1,590 Pro-Am Event and what kind of people would play. The answer to the former is that the event drew 190 runners, generating a prize pool of $259,350, with $180,000 set aside for the nine guaranteed Epic Main Event seats as well as $79,350 in cash prizes.

As for who showed up for the tournament, many were surprised to see a number of players who already had guaranteed seats into the Main Event.  Thirty-five of the runners in the event were League members simply trying to get into the Main Event on the cheap. In the early goings, it seemed as though a number of the League Pros would keep the “amateurs” on the outside looking in, as 11 of the 29 Day 1 survivors already had cards, but in the end, only Andy Bloch would make the top nine and win a seat.

The rest of the final table line-up may have been short on League Pros, but there were plenty of notable names, including O’Dwyer, Brandon Meyers, Dan Fleyshman, and Micah Raskin.

A portion of the final table played out away from the cameras, as WSOP bracelet winner Sean Getzwiller, George Long, and Fleyshman picked up Main Event seats, but missed out on the TV component of the action. Getzwiller did not pick up any extra cash, but Long and Fleyshman got tiny cash bonuses on their seats worth $1,190 and $1,980 respectively. Once the field got down to six, play paused to resume on the Heartland Poker Tour set on Monday.   While the Main Event will be filmed and produced by 441 Productions, the Pro-Am is under the HPT banner.

When the final table began, O’Dwyer was the player to beat, beginning with the chip lead. He and Meyers battled back and forth for the top spot during the early goings, but it was Bloch who earned the first knockout of the day, busting Raskin in sixth place. The two got it all-in preflop with Bloch holding a dominating AK to Raskin’s A5. The board ran out T42JA and Raskin hit the rail.

Jeremiah DeGreef was the next to go when Meyers put a short-stacked DeGreef all-in from the small blind. DeGreef called all-in for his remaining 12 big blinds or so with K9 and Meyers showed Q3. Meyers paired up on the J63 flop and, when DeGreef fialed to improve after the 7 on the turn and the T on the river, he was done in fifth place.

O’Dwyer dispatched Cliff Waite in fourth place when both players flopped two pair on a QJ9 board. O’Dwyer’s queens and nines held up against Waite’s jacks and nines to eliminate Waite in fourth and give O’Dwyer a big lead headed into three-handed play.

That huge lead translated into a lot of preflop shoving from O’Dwyer, who was picking up hand after hand and applying the pressure on his opponents.  Meyers got a boost to his stack when he doubled thru O’Dwyer, but O’Dwyer still had three times as much as either of his opponents.

Bloch got the last of his chips in holding pocket threes to O’Dwyer’s KQ.  O’Dwyer turned a straight, leaving Bloch drawing dead to a chop.  The river was a blank and the last League pro headed home, while O’Dwyer and Meyers prepared for heads-up action.

When heads-up play began, O’Dwyer held a nearly 5-1 chip advantage and Meyers was down to less than twenty big blinds.  The match was a relatively brief affair, coming to a close when Meyers limped then shoved all-in over the top of O’Dwyer’s raise with A5.  O’Dwyer called with A8 and his hand held up as the board ran out QT367.  He claimed the top payday and picked up his second consecutive tournament victory.

O’Dwyer is on a bit of a heater, having taken down the $5,000 postlim event at Bellagio Cup for $249,452.  While it still didn’t qualify him for the League, O’Dwyer is happy with his back to back victories and looking forward to seeing what the Epic Main Event has in store for him tomorrow, as well as further down the line.

“Hopefully they make a ton of money and give it back to the players, because I think it’s been a long time coming,” says O’Dwyer.  Some of these companies that profited off the entertainment value provided by the players haven’t given any of it back…It is nice to see that someone who collects rake gives it back to the players that make TV poker so interesting.”

O’Dwyer and the other nine final tablists of the Pro-Am will be in action starting at noon on Tuesday for the $20,000 Main Event opening day.

Here are the final table results from the Epic Poker Pro-Am Event:

1st: Steve O’Dwyer – $20,000 seat + $23,810
2nd: Brandon Meyers – $20,000 seat + $11,900
3rd: Andy Bloch – $20,000 seat + $7,540
4th: Cliff Waite – $20,000 seat + $5,160
5th: Jeremiah DeGreef – $20,000 seat + $3,570
6th: Micah Raskin – $20,000 seat + $2,780
7th: Dan Fleyshman – $20,000 seat + $1,980
8th: George Long – $20,000 seat + $1,190
9th: Sean Getzwiller – $20,000 seat

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