China’s Chen Qin Wins Record Breaking Beijing Millions Main Event

Asia Pacific Poker Tour created news, when earlier last month it announced its first ever Chinese poker series, the 2014 Beijing Millions. The biggest draw of the series was the ¥ 3,000 buy-in Main Event that featured six starting flights, at the Beijing Star Poker Club, China from July 18 to 27.

On Sunday, the Main Event saw a relatively unknown Chinese player Chen Qin (cover image) winning, amongst a massive player field of 2732 entries. This makes the tournament the largest outside of America, setting a new PokerStars record (previous one being 2,446 entries from the 2013 Brazilian Series of Poker).

APPT had decided to get the poker tournament to China, considering the growing interest in the game in the country. The gamble has certainly paid off, as the final table witnessed all nine players being Chinese. A significant number of Chinese players, 35% in fact, 629 in number had attended the 2014 Macau Millions. China’s Hao Chen was winner, taking the big prize of HK$ 550,000.

APPT President Danny McDonagh had been instrumental in getting the series into China and after the event was over ecstatically declared, “We always believed that this would be a successful event but this result greatly exceeded our wildest expectations.” Speaking about the expanding poker scene in China, he added, “It’s a great honour for PokerStars and the APPT team to be selected to support this tournament. It’s been a historical week. Not just the record itself but how it may change the future landscape for poker in China.”

Jian Yang, Principal of AoBoTe (Beijing AoBoTe Sports Culture-Transmitting Company Limited) echoed the sentiments saying, “I’m so happy to run such a successful event in Beijiing and have the support of APPT and the event organizers from the Beijing Sports and Administration Centre. APPT is a professional event management group capable of running major international poker tournaments and together we created a miracle with the Beijing Millions. I hope the cooperation between APPT and Star Poker will strengthen and develop poker further in China.”

The Beijing Sports Competitions Administration Centre, a division of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports, were organizers for the 10-day poker festivities.

Sunday marked Day 2 of the Main event, with 6 entry-flight days over, bringing the field down to 188, which had some prominent players, such as Team PokerStars Pros Celina Lin, Bryan Huang, and Vivian Im.

However, the PokerStars pros were unable to sustain the pace and Haung exited at 50^th, with Im eliminated at 51^st. Celina Lin fared better, as she was the last woman at the table, until her exit at 24^th place.

The final hand had Yang Zhang as opponent to Qin, who already had the advantage of a mammoth stack with 17.1 million. Zhang had no way to battle the huge pile, with his meager 9 million.

The final hand came in, when the blinds had reached a monumental 200k-400k, 50k ante. The two opponents received a flop that delivered .

Zhang bet 550k, only to have Qin check-call the move. When the turn delivered a , Qin grabbed the opportunity to raise Zhang’s bet of 1 million up to 2.5 million. Zhang called and went all in, but the river brought , which was again called. The winner was declared when Qin revealed a full house with his , against the , held by Zhang.

Beijing Millions Main Event Final Table Results