David Shallow Wins 2012 WPT Ireland

David Shallow has won the World Poker Tour Ireland, after defeating a field of 338 players over four days to lift the title, and collect the €222,280 ($289,032) first-place prize.
Previous to his win, David Shallow was showing seven cashes since 2005 for $35,358, but now boosts his live tournament earnings to $324,390.
As the final table of the €2,500 buy-in tournament got underway, David Shallow was the chip leader on a 6.155 million stack, folowed by Steve Watts (1.6m), Patrik Vestlin (1.1m), Charles Chattha (835k), and Ronan Gilligan (775k).
It then took just three hours for the UK player to outlast his opponents for the victory, after which he commented:
“It’s the first WPT I’ve won. It feels good. It didn’t seem that quick to me, but obviously I was playing.”
First to exit the final table was Steve Watts, who pushed his stack holding pocket tens into the A-K of Ronan Gilligan. The board then ran out Q-J-7-9-10 to make Gilligan the straight and send Watts to the rail in 5th for €39,270 ($51,063).
Ronan Gilligan was then dealt Js-9d and called Patrik Vestlin’s cut-off raise with As-Qc. Gilligan subsequently check-raised the 9s-7s-3s flop forcing the all-in from his opponent, who failed to improve and so exited in 4th for €52,600 ($68,396).
However, Gilligan may have overplayed some of his hands and was eventually eliminated after calling a pre-flop raise by David Shallow with just 3-4. Gilligan caught an open-ended straight draw to Shallow’s top pair, and with both players all-in on the flop, Gilligan failed to improve his hand and so exited in 3rd for €74,090 ($96,339).
“I blew up in the end, It’s great to get this far. I played really well on Saturday and I played really bad today..But it’s all good,” commented Gilligan.
As the heads-up phase of the competition commenced, David Shallow held a 7.28m to 2.86m chip advantage over Chaz Chattha. Despite losing the lead at one point, Shallow battled well with the final hand coming after he was dealt pocket queens to his Chattha’s pocket nines.
Charles Chattha then collected €111,130 ($144,502) for his runner-up finish, while David Shallow claimed the WPT title, plus a $25,000 ticket to the WPT World Championship.