Roger Teska wins first event of WPT season XVIII
August 2, 2019 1:05 pm
The 18th season of the World Poker Tour kicked off last week with the premiere event of the new season – the WPT Garden Poker Festival.
Played at the Gardens Casino in Los Alamito California, the $5,000 main event ended up with a 373-player field. That led to a $1,753,100 prize pool.
The bulk of that went to Roger Teska. The 34-year-old native of Bloomington, Indiana was the last man standing to cash $368,475. That followed a $2 million cash Teska posted in last year’s partypoker Caribbean Poker Tour to bump his lifetime live-poker earnings to just under $3.3 million.
It came down to Teska and Laszlo Molnar heads-up for the tournament title. When heads-up play began Teska had a large hole to crawl out of facing a near 5-to-1 chip deficit.
He began chipping away at Molnar’s stack immediately with a double up on the first hand of heads-up. Teska was all-in with Qh-Js versus Molnar’s Ah-Qd and took down the pot with a straight after the board showed Ad-10d-4s-Kh-10c.
One of the key hands happened late in the tournament after Teska hit quad sevens to take a monster pot from Molnar. After that hand Molnar was down to 1.7 million chips, or eight big blinds.
On the final hand of the tournament Molnar pushed all-in preflop and Teska called. Molnar showed Kc-Qc and trailed Teska who showed Ah-6c. The flop was Jc-4d-9h, giving Molnar a straight draw.
The turn provided more outs for Molnar when the 3c fell giving him an additional flush draw. Any King, Queen, Ten or Club would have given Molnar the hand, but it was not to be as the 2s fell on the river.
For second place Molnar cashed $235,615.
Along with his own big cash and first WPT title Teska also received a 2019 BMW X1 for the win and a $15,000 seat in the WPT Tournament of Champions at the end of the season.