Maria Mayrinck has joined Team PokerStars Pro after signing her contract earlier this week.

The PokerStars-sponsored Latin American Poker Tour’s cancelled Season 2 Mexico event has finally crowned a champion. If you missed the story the first time around, that tournament was shut down last December by local government authorities on the second day of a planned three-day event and the prize pool was distributed among the 89 players who still had chips. As a gesture of goodwill to its players, the online poker room staged a freeroll early this year for those players in which they started with the same number of chips they had left when the live event was cancelled. Yesterday the final nine players from the online freeroll flew to the Uruguayan luxury resort town of Punta del Este to play a televised final table with a $50,000 prize pool.

The winner of the LAPT Nuevo Vallarta title was 26-year-old Rory Cox of Lexington, Va. On his way to the title Cox had to make it past Team PokerStars pro Victor Ramdin and Costa Rica’s three-time LAPT final tablist, Alex Brenes. After defeating fellow American Helen Prager in heads-up play, Cox walked away with $15,000 of the $50,000 prize pool.

When the final table was concluded PokerStars announced that it will hold a second freeroll tournament, this time open to all players who attended LAPT Nueva Vallarta last year, regardless of whether they played in the main event, second chance event, or side events. The final ten players in the freeroll, to be held April 4-5, will win a full package for this season’s LAPT Grand Final in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

“We know that many of our players travelled to Mexico to play the full schedule of events, not just the main event,” said Sarne Lightman, Director of Marketing for PokerStars Latin America. “As these events were also cancelled we want to offer any players who attended LAPT Nuevo Vallarta a chance to qualify for what will be our biggest and most exciting LAPT yet.”

In more Latin American news for the world’s largest online poker room, Maria “Maridu” Mayrinck has joined its roster of Team PokerStars pros. Mayrinck, a popular blogger from Brazil, cashed three times at the 2008 WSOP and will be looking to add to that total this year as a sponsored player. “I guarantee on my end that I will always do my best to honor the name of the best poker site on the planet, which I respect so much,” Mayrinck said of her newly official affiliation. “I am very aware of the great privilege this is and I won’t take any of it for granted.”

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