With the Main Event of the Asian Poker Tour Championship taking place right now, we take a look at some of the many routes people have taken to make it out to Taiwan.
Steve O'Dwyer is a familiar face on the high roller circuit and a player you're likely to encounter on any continent, wherever poker is played for high stakes. But this is actually the first time he's played an APT Main Event.
We asked O'Dwyer why now is the time for him to make his APT Main Event debut, but he asked another question: Where are all the US players who complain there aren't enough big freezeouts?
This is my fifth time here. I played twice at Poker Dream, the first time was in 2022, and then I came for the APT event here last spring — it was right before Triton, I could only play the high rollers in the first few days, I couldn't play the rest of it.
And then I came earlier this year to play at the Dream Room, which is owned by my friend, and we played some stream games with Henrik Hecklen and Jungleman that they set up for us. That was a lot of fun. But this is my first time playing at this venue.
This is also the first time I've ever played an APT Main Event. The one I was here for in the spring last year in Taipei was the first time I’d ever attended one.
People assume that I must have played a bunch of APTs over the years, but they’ve always conflicted with something that’s easier for me to play, or an EPT or something. For the last 15 years, it’s always conflicted with something else.
Then when Michael Soyza and those guys took over the APT a few years ago, I promised them I would make my best effort to come. And then they announced this thing, and I've been waiting for a spiritual successor to the Asia Championship of Poker in Macau, which we've been missing out on for years. That always used to be one of my favorite events, and this is kind of the successor to that.
I love Soyza and those guys and have wanted to support them since they took it over. This is the first time I've been able to make it to a full series and play a Main Event.
O'Dwyer survived the bubble to make the money in his first APT Main Event.
‘It's not like this is like Siberia’
Things aren’t that different here. Poker's poker, it’s the same game pretty much anywhere in the world.
I love this city, but I’m kind of disappointed that there aren't more Western, English-speaking players here. You see people complaining so often on Twitter, like, ‘Everything is 8 re-entries now, it's bullshit’, and then these guys at the APT take a big shot and run a huge freezeout, and all those same people I see complaining on Twitter all the time, none of them are here.
It's not like this is like Siberia, it's easy to get to. It's a very Western-friendly city, almost everybody speaks English, and it's really cheap.
There's no real excuse why people are going to go play some bullshit rake trap in the Bahamas over this. I won’t be at WSOP Paradise, I'm Bahamas-retired.
And it pains me to say it, but I'm finally going to miss an EPT Prague. I've been going for the last few years, even with all the scheduling conflicts, but I came out here with my wife, and I promised her we'd do some vacationing afterwards. We’re going to hang out in Asia.
Images courtesy of the APT.
