Steven “SvZff” van Zadelhoff, a Dutch pro based in Malta, capped a 15-year online and live tournament playing career this week with a $1.6 million win in the main event of the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker.
The win augments an already impressive career earnings record achieved by van Zadelhoff that includes $3.8 million playing online, and $1.5 million playing live.
The $5,200 buy-in main event carried a guaranteed prize pool of $10 million and attracted a total of 2,183 entrants (1,804 unique and 379 re-entries), resulting in an actual prize pool of $10,915,000, with $1,64,502.27 reserved for the winner and enough left over for 278 other players to cash.
Van Zadelhoff reached the final table as the chip leader holding just over a third of the chips in play and managed to hold that position for much of the action, at one point holding over half the chips in play.
His only real threat was Canadian player joshuah333, who managed to take the lead on at least two occasions and faced van Zadelhoff in the heads up, with van Zadelhoff on 75,936,059 vs. joshuah333’s 33,213,941.
With such a disparity it didn’t take long – seven hands, in fact – for van Zadelhoff to claim the win after a total three-and-a-half hours of final table action, sending his Canadian opponent to the exit and an impressive $1.17 million runner up reward.
Other final table cashes included:
Bernardo “Machadada RS” Rocha (Brazil) $848,015.82
Alexandre “Cavalito” Mantovani (Brazil) $612,697.15
JeremiieLand (Austria) $442,677.47
Geokarak (United Kingdom) $319,837.87
Kekkhou (Finland) $231,084.73
romanooo64 (Thailand) $166,961.29
imluckbox (Thailand) $120,630.39