Alaei wins the WPT Five Diamond Poker Classic Event

With a field of 328 players the Doyle Brunson Diamond World Poker Classic event is a tough cookie. But someone was there to climb to the top and fated to crush his opponents. Daniel Christopher is the man to be who won the WPT title bagging more than $1.4 million as prize money.

Alaei specializes on NLHE cash games and has already collected more than $3.7 million dollars in live games during his poker career. He has 2 WSOP bracelets to his name and had won the $10,000 World Championship Omaha Hi/Lo 8-or-better event and made 18 cashes in the WSOP earning him an amount of $1,533,917 respectively.

During the primary day of the $15,000 WPT event, he decided to leave the main game in order for him to participate to the side games. He said, “I signed up to play and some guys were starting up a big cash game,” “So, I played in that over the tournament for the rest of the day.”

When the time for the final table to be played, Daniel came up with very competitive competitors on his table and that includes Josh Arieh, Faraz “The-Toilet” Jaka, Shawn Buchanan, Scotty Nguyen, and Stephen “MrTimCaum” O’Dwyer.

Scotty Nguyen, 5 times winner of the WSOP was trying to reclaim his fame and tried to get the WPT title. But he only came in fifth and brought home a prize of $249,976. He was praised by the other players for his skill and he said:

“Everybody is a good player these days. You’ve got to respect that. All these young kids these days, they come in to play and they have nothing to fear. They have nothing to lose, only gain.”

The hardest part of the game for Alaei was when he was head to head with 2 time WSOP winner Josh Arieh. They played a good deal of cards before the final hand that decided it all appeared. Arieh holds 7 pockets and the flop is 10-2-5. He placed all his money on the pot post-flop. Then Alaei made a call with a 10, 8 card. Alaei won with the hand and Arieh went home $952,290 richer.

“It was not an easy call for me,” Alaei commented. “If he had a 10, I was pretty much dead.”

Daniel Alaei took home $1,428,430 for his winnings. He was asked about what it felt to win his first WPT title and he said, “This is great. I’ve wanted one of these for a while. I was one of my only friends who didn’t have one.”