Tsang and Kanit Discuss €11.11M ONE DROP Victory

The €1 million buy-in One Drop Extravaganza was held at the Monte Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort last week, and although no professional players were allowed to enter, many of the wealthy businessman who did take part in the ultra-high roller tournament recruited the services of some of the game’s top pros.
For instance, the One Drop Extravaganza’s creator Guy Laliberté had Daniel Negreanu in his corner, while eventual winner Elton Tsang benefitted from the experience of Italian player Mustapha Kanit, a young pro who has amassed $7,735,689 in live earnings since 2009, as well as a further $4,558,189 online playing under the screen name Lasagnaaammm.
Having taken down the third biggest prize in poker tournament history worth €11,111,111 ($12,248,912), the dynamic duo have bee discussing some of the tactics they employed to gain an advantage over their opponents, including an in-depth analysis of the playing styles of Elton Tsang’s opponents. One of the players the duo had a great deal of information on was Andrew Pantling, and by the time the bubble reared its head, Tsang used the time to apply maximum pressure on Pantling. As he explained during a pokernews interview:
“[Kanit] was telling me to just put the pressure on since it was bubble time. I was just loosening up and just started raising, raising, raising, raising, raising.”
Kanit also said that he and Tsang had put more effort into their preparations than their opponents, helped by the fact that they were already good friends way before the competition. In fact, two weeks before it got underway Kanit had traveled to Asia to hook up with his friend, and as he explains:
“We were in Asia together and we would do reviews. I would send him videos, I would send him hands, we would talk about strategy, we talked a lot about poker. Every single break we spent together. We put a lot of work in.”
As well as his recently brushed up tournament skills, also working in Tsang’s favor was the fact he was unphased by the astronomical money involved as he is already used to playing poker at the highest stakes. This combination of factors helped swing the game Tsang’s way, with him later stating that he felt comfortable, and that his reads and bluffs had worked well. Nevertheless, Tsang also acknowledges that he received some good luck during the BIG ONE, without which it would have been difficult to have enjoyed the same level of success.
“I was pretty confident but I mean, you still need cards to hit and stuff, right?” commented Tsang. “In tournaments, you can’t just rely on pure skill, so I was pretty happy with the cards.”
Final Table Results:
1: Elton Tsang €11,111,111
2: Anatoly Gurtovoy €5,427,781
3: Rick Salomon €3,000,000
4: James Bord €2,100,000
5: Cary Katz €1,750,000
6: Andrew Pantling €1,500,000