Kyle Hartree is Winter Super Stack High Point Champion After Final-Minute Sweat
Lane Anderson
Deerfoot Inn & Casino’s first Super Stack tournament series of the year has come to an exciting finish with Kyle Hartree emerging as the High Point Champion.
The 12-day, 13-event Winter Super Stack ran from January 26 to February 6 at the Calgary casino and promised some fantastic extra value for the best player across the series. The player with the most points would earn a 2017 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event seat worth $10,000 USD, generously donated by Deerfoot Inn & Casino, and the top point-earning Albertan would get a one-year lease on a Toyota RAV4 for free courtesy of South Pointe Toyota.
Each in-the-money finish earned players points toward the leaderboard and it was a tight race right until the end. It started with a few Saskatchewan boys dominating the race, but their ineligibility for the car left that part of the prize wide open to some good Albertan performances. Trevor Norlander, Jared Klimosko, and Michael Smith were the top point-earners for the early half of the series, all from Saskatchewan.
Of course, the $1,500 Main Event that concluded the series would be where the most points would be earned due to the higher buy-in and large field. At the beginning of the final day of the series, Jared Klimosko held the most points, having won two of the events already, which is an incredible feat.
Klimosko was in the field for Day 2 of the Main Event still and a deep run would secure his hold on the High Point Champion prize of the WSOP seat, but his elimination before the money bubble meant he didn’t add any more points to his tally, opening up the door to a few other contenders.
Kyle Hartree was in the running to take over the points race and did so once Bill Thomson was eliminated in seventh place in the Main Event, guaranteeing Hartree at least sixth place and enough points to pass Klimosko. But Hartree was the next player eliminated, and there was still one player remaining who could overtake the lead.
Paul Sokoloff was among the final five but would need an outright win to become the High Point Champion. Hartree had a white-knuckle sweat as Sokoloff made it to heads-up play and was within inches of winning the race. But Josh Wallace found the win, eliminating Sokoloff in second place and allowing Hartree to breath a sigh of relief as he officially became the winner of the WSOP Main Event seat and the one-year RAV4 lease.
It’s a testament to the value of playing every event in the series that the High Point Champion was not the winner of the Main Event or the second-largest tournament of the series, the Mega Stack. Even Jared Klimosko’s two wins (the $330 four-game mix and the $330 pot-limit Omaha bounty event) were not enough to earn him the title. Kyle Hartree’s win came from finishing third in Event #2, second in Event #5, winning Event #13, and, of course, his sixth-place finish in the Main Event.
2017 Winter Super Stack Winners
| Event | Winner | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| Event #1: $550 Mega Stack | Trevor Norlander | $38,000 |
| Event #2: $330 4 Game Mix | Jared Klimosko | $4,500 |
| Event #3: $330 PLO Bounty | Jared Klimosko | $3,850 |
| Event #4: $220 NLH | Eric Wasylenko | $5,600 |
| Event #5: $220 NLH Roll Back Rebuy | Gwen Stopanski | $5,244 |
| Event #6: $330 NLH Deep Stack | Sunny Lubana | $7,700 |
| Event #7: $1,100 Heads Up NLH | Talal Shoush | $9,800 |
| Event #8: $220 PLO | John Shepard | $4,144 |
| Event #9: $220 NLH | Arun Mattu | $5,900 |
| Event #10: $1,500 Main Event | Josh Wallace | $78,000 |
| Event #11: $330 Bounty | Andrei Pui | $5,400 |
| Event #12: $220 Team Event | Manvir Dhaliwal and Jon Vo | $3,550 |
| Event #13: $330 Super Bowl Sunday | Kyle Hartree | $4,650 |
Congratulations to the winners. Deerfoot Inn & Casino generally run three Super Stack series each year, so there are still the Spring and Summer editions to look forward to in Calgary.
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