The big winner over the weekend at Pokerstars’ Spring Championship of Online Poker was 30-year-old UK poker pro Julian “MrCoco” Gardner, who bested a final table that included serious internet aces like Phil Galfond and Jason Mercier to claim the $118,606.67 main prize in the $1,000 buy-in Pot-Limit Omaha 6-Max w/ Rebuys event.
The event attracted 241 hopefuls, among them names like Dan Kelly, Fredrik Halling, John Leathart, Jason Gray, Michael Benvenuti, and Rami Boukai, generating a prize pool of $682,000.
The final table of six players was finally whittled down to just three – Mercier, Galfond and Gardner but it took some time, and the threesome professed to being tired after so long at the virtual table. Perhaps this prompted the decision to make a three-way chop, leaving $4,000 on the table for the winner.
Gardner’s slight chip lead on his opponents, along with a good turn of the cards in the final hand, enabled him to claim the main prize, leaving Mercier and Galfond with $114,606.67 apiece.
Gardner hails from Manchester, England, where he turned pro the moment he left high school. He has built up over a million sterling in career earnings in both live and online games. He finished second in the 2002 World Series of Poker main event to Varkhoni, earning $1.1 million as an impressive start to his live tournament career.