Kevin Vandersmissen Wins The 2012 Irish Open

Posted at 02:01 2012-04-11 by Matthew Pitt

Kevin Vandersmissen may not be a household name at the moment but here at PokerNetwork we think all that will change in the not too distant future.

The young Belgian pro first appeared became known in the middle of 2010 when he first won a €375 buy-in event in his native Belgium before winning the $500 Venetian Deep Stack event in Las Vegas the following month for a cool $60,700. From there he has reached the final table of the Amsterdam Masters, won a €3,000 buy-in event in Barcelona, cashed in several more major live tournaments including a second place finish in the PokerStars EPT Snowfest last year. Now he has the title of Irish Open champion.

Vandersmissen started the nine handed final table as the shortest stack but he found a double up quite early into the day to give himself a little more breathing room. Once he had a playable stack he constantly applied pressure to his opponents and was always accumulating chips without being involved in any large pots.

Whilst Vandersmissen was busy picking up chips those around him were busy losing theirs at an alarming rate. In fact they were bleeding chips that quickly that the heads-up section of the tournament was reached within five levels of play.

Going into heads-up Vandersmissen held a narrow 5,531,000 to 4,499,000 chip lead over Germany's Thomas Beer and Beer never looked like he was ever going to close that gap as Vandermissen put his foot firmly on the gas. The final hand saw Beer open to 160,000 and his Belgian opponent call. A flop reading saw a raising war break out that started with a check from Vandersmissen, a bet of 200,000 from Beer then the action went check-raise to 480,000, raise to 800,000, shove of 7,000,000 from Vandersmissen and a call! Vandermissen turned over for top pair and Beer could only muster . The turn and river were the and respectively and with that Vandermissen had won the 2012 Irish Open!

2012 Irish Open Final Table Results

Position	Name	Prize
1st	Kevin Vandersmissen	€420,000
2nd	Thomas Beer	€225,000
3rd	David Dean	€158,000
4th	Ian Simpson	€107,500
5th	Steve Watts	€78,000
6th	Jordan Lewis	€59,000
7th	Samuel Chartier	€44,500
8th	Andy Black	€32,700
9th	Philip Magennis	€23,000

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