Taiwan’s Pete Chen was the ultimate victor in the World Poker Tour’s first-ever Main Event held in Beijing.

Chen outlasted 400 entries and outlasted a final table that included noted pro Bryan Huang to scoop a $299k haul and a ticket into the $15,000 WPT Tournament of Champions next year.

The Taiwanese native now has over $1m in lifetime live tournament earnings, the majority of which are from Macau, but he has made trips to play in LA and Las Vegas so the TOC trip shouldn’t be too difficult.

WPT Beijing was also the very first tournament for Season 16 so Chen grabbed an early lead in the Player of the Year race.

Haung Hits Rail in Sixth

Long-time poker pro Bryan Huang, who dominated a huge portion of WPT Beijing, was surprisingly the first player to be eliminated from the six-player final table.

Huang started the table with short stack of 16 big blinds so he was actively shoving from the start of play.

Unfortunately for Huang he shoved pocket deuces into Zhang Wenbin’s pocket jacks and that was it for the Singaporean pro. Huang added $54k to his $1.1 million in lifetime live tournament earnings.

Beijing was a unique event for the WPT because a portion of the field were Chinese locals who qualified through Ourgame’s social poker game while the rest were made up of international players who bought in directly.

Next up for the WPT is a high-profile stop in Amsterdam starting on May 5.

The WPT has teamed up with PokerStars a promotion they’re calling “The MonteDam Swing” where players who take part in both WPT Amsterdam and PokerStars Championship Monte Carlo have a chance to win some extra cash.

Here are the complete final-table payouts (*First place also includes $15k TOC seat) for WPT Beijing:

1st place: Pete Yanhan Chen – CNY 2,063,454* (US $299,485*)
2nd place: Chen Ke – CNY 1,373,026 (US $199,278)
3rd place: Lu Yingqi – CNY 882,619 (US $128,101)
4th place: Zhang Wenben – CNY 585,468 (US $84,974)
5th place: Tan Yancheng – CNY 450,616 (US $65,401)
6th place: Bryan Huang – CNY 373,218 (US $54,168)

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