Paulius Plausinaitis Wins Massive WSOP Circuit Online Main Event

1/17/2021

The 2020 GGPoker World Series of Poker Winter Online Circuit $1,7000 buy-in no-limit hold ’em main event attracted a massive field of 6,395 total entries, surpassing the $10 million guarantee to create a final prize pool of $10,327,925. In the end, Lithuania’s Paulius Plausinaitis emerged victorious with the WSOPC gold ring and the first-place prize of $1,236,361.

The event featured several starting flights to choose from, with 1,112 players surviving today 2. The top 700 finishers made money, with a min-cash being worth $4,107. It took over seven hours to narrow the field from over a thousand players down to a nine competitors’ final table. Plausinaitis sat in the chip lead with Artem Prostak and WSOP bracelet winner Joseph Cheong having the next-largest stacks when the dust settled.

Prostak earned the first knockout at the final table by eliminating ‘BetAddict’ in ninth place ($123,106). Cheong kept pace by eliminating ‘DaiMing141319’ as the eighth-place finisher, sending the Chinese player to the virtual rail with $164,165.

Cheong continued his climb up the leaderboard by busting Romanian bracelet winner Alexandru Papazian in seventh place. Cheong picked up pocket jacks in the big blins and called Papazian’s shove from the small blind. Papazian’s A-5 offsuit failed to improve, and he earned $218,917 for his latest deep run.

Prostak lost a race with pocket queens against an opponent’s A-K suited to slide down the leaderboard a bit. He then fell all the way to the bottom of the chip counts when his pocket aces were cracked by the pocket jacks of ‘likeboy’ after all of the chips went in preflop. Prostak was left quite short after that hand and was eliminated in sixth place ($291,931) not long after.

Cheong continued to add to his lead by busting ‘likeboy’ in fourth place. The smaller stack got his last chips in good, with A-J dominating the Q-J of Cheong. The Q-Q-J flop gave Cheong a full house, though, and ‘likeboy’ was drawing dead after the turn failed to bring an ace. They earned $519,134 for their strong showing.

Cheong lost an all-in versus the short stack during three-handed play and then slipped further down the leaderboard. He ultimately was eliminated in a battle of the blinds. He shoved with A4 from the small blind, and Plausinaitis called with QQ in the big blind. Plausinaitis made a set of queens by the river to eliminate Cheong in third place ($692,276).

With that, Plausinaitis took more than a 5:1 chip lead into heads-up play against ‘turkey1’. The shorter stack player found some key double-ups and overtook the lead briefly, but Plausinaitis could regain a big chip advantage by the time the final hand was dealt. The last eight or so big blinds of ‘turkey1’ went in preflop with Q9. Plausinaitis called with A10, and the board ran out 933A8. Plausinaitis secured the pot and the title with aces and threes, while ‘turkey1’ earned $923,165 as of the runner-up finisher.

Here is a look at the payouts awarded at the final table: