The allure of running up a tiny buy-in into a fortune is one which any online poker player can relate to.
Satellites and super-satellites give us the chance to take incremental steps up the ladder, starting small and edging our way up towards much more expensive tournaments.
But when you face extreme changes in pressure over a short timeframe, the results are not always easy to handle. Just ask any scuba diver… or many online poker players.
Every now and then, though, we see a success story. And few are as inspiring as that of Austria’s ‘72oooo’.
Their outlay? $10.
Combined time at the tables? Under 11 hours.
The payday? Over $411K.
Here’s how it happened at GGPoker this week.
The ultimate spin-up
On April 5 72oooo — a player yet to record a significant tournament score — put up the $10 to enter a Step tournament and play for a $108 ticket. Just 14 entrants meant they’d need to finish top of the pile to land the ticket, and they did after just 31 minutes of play.
A couple of hours later they put that ticket into action, playing the next Step up: a $108 tournament awarding a $1,050 ticket. 44 entrants meant the top 4 would get paid, and 72oooo once again made it. 85 minutes later, the ticket was theirs.
Again, they did not rest on their laurels and entered the next Step up without delay, playing for a $10,000 ticket as part of a field of 24. This time the top 2 was the target, and once again 72oooo made it all the way, this time in just over an hour.
That left poker’s most recent folk hero with an entry to the $10K GGMillion$ High Roller, a two-day event starting the next day.
It would also be the toughest test they’d face on the journey so far. Having topped the competition in the $10, $108 and $1,050 stakes, they were now facing many of poker’s elite players.
By the time the final table was reached they found themselves battling with the likes of Bernhard Binder, winner of $10M in the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event. Then there was Armenian-born Aram Oganyan, now one of California’s top 12 with over $8M in live tournament earnings, and a field of bruisers hailing from everywhere from Russia to Brazil, Germany and Panama.
As if that wasn’t tough enough, the plucky qualifier hit the FT with the shortest stack of the 9 remaining. That made them the longest shot in the field according to GGPoker’s own published odds, which had him around a 22-to-1 underdog.
If you took that action, well done you. 72oooo held on and survived as players began to fall, scoring their first final table elimination when they KO’d Brazil’s Lucas Rocha to thin the field to 5.
From there on, things accelerated. By the time only 4 remained, 72oooo held a commanding chip lead with over 12M chips — no one else had more than 4M. When action reached heads-up, they had well over half the chips in play.
A few hands later, 72oooo was dealt 4-4, their opponent 'Calitox' had A-T. The chips went in, the board ran out Q-7-2-2-8 and the $411,843 went to the player who a few days earlier had tried their luck for ten bucks.
Jeff Gross and Daniel Petersen watched the final table play out, and you can too — check the video here.
