POKER ROOM REVIEW NEWSWIRE

Valdemar Kwaysser Wins LAPT Event

The second stop in the inaugural season of the Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) has wrapped up and poker player Valdemar Kwaysser will go down in history as the first ever winner of the LAPT San Jose, taking home $274,103 in the process.

Kwaysser arrived third in chips at the tough final table that included several well-known online poker pros in Steve Silverman, Alex Griffin, Alec Torelli and Joe Ebanks. The 24-year-old proceeded to take advantage of as many situations as possible and one of his lucky hands was a runner-runner flush to put Silverman out of the tournament and give Kwaysser a 3 to 1 chip lead going into heads-up play and that's just a taste of the bad beats delivered by the Hungarian.

Luck box or not, Kwaysser negotiated his way through a 397-player field that featured poker pros Daniel Negreanu, Humberto Brenes, Victor Ramdin and Isabelle Mercier, TV personality Montel Williams and baseball greats David Wells and Orel Hershiser to take home only his second major tournament cash and most definitely his largest to date.

Here's the final payouts for the rest of the final table:

1. Valdemar Kwaysser - $274,103
2. Max Steinberg - $144,773
3. Steven Silverman - $106,167
4. Alexander Soderlund - $77,212
5. Alec Torelli - $57,909
6. Pawel Sanojca - $38,606
7. Ashton Griffin - $28,955
8. Joe Ebanks - $19,303

The next LAPT event takes place in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August once the madness that is the 2008 WSOP has calmed down.

Oh, by the way, that starts in three days.