This year’s edition of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour Goliath tournament was brought to its end at Sunday with Elliot Marais taking down the event and emerging victorious. Marais managed to defeat all his opponents at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, climbing on top of the list to claim the tournament’s title as well as the lion’s share of the guaranteed prize pool.
The player, who used a direct buy-in of £120 to enter the tournament and managed to turn it into a monetary prize of £85,760.
The 2017 edition of the event beat all previous records of players engagement, accounting to a total of 6,835 entries and surpassing last year’s total of 5,232 entries. The massive participation turned this year’s Grosvenor UK Poker Tour Goliath into one of the biggest live poker tournament held outside poker Mecca Las Vegas, making Elliot Marais part of the most elite poker players around the world. The players field accounted for an overall guaranteed prize pool surpassing £250,000.
The Grosvenor UK Poker Tour Goliath is an annual poker event organised by Grosvenor Casino. In 2017, the tournament started on July 27th and ended on August 6th.
At the time when the final table was formed, Marais was towards the upper end of the leadership board. The first three players got eliminated after only an hour of play. Two more players were sent back home over the second hour of play, with only four remaining players left around the final table at the end of the second hour. At this time, Elliot Marais was third in chips. However, he managed to gain advantage over his competitors.
At the end, there were only two players left around the final table, with Marais being one of them. Eventually, he managed to beat his last standing opponent Tai Hong, leaving him into the second position and generating his largest-ever live tournament cash to date. Despite being a non-professional, Marais proved that poker pros are not the only ones who are able to generate massive prizes by beating down their competitions at the largest tournaments on a global scale.
With Elliot Marais emerging as winner of the 2017 Grosvenor Casino Goliath Tournament scooping a guaranteed prize pool portion of £85,760, it is Tai Hoang who was left on the runner-up position, taking home a consolation prize estimated to £62,060. The third place was taken by Levan Reid, who was granted with a monetary prize amounting to £44,630.
Paul Adrian Morris got fourth, followed by Robert Shore. The six place in the ranking was occupied by Calum James Goodwin, while Oneib Saeed got to the seventh place. The eighth and ninth positions in the ranking were taken by Fabio Liriomiranda and Dean Perry, respectively.
- Author
Harry Evans
