Gus Hansen. Carlos Mortensen. Chino Rheem. Anthony Zinno. And now Darren Elias.
That's a pretty select group of poker players who have won 3 career World Poker Tour titles.
Elias became the latest to join the elite group this past Friday at a record-breaking CAD $5,000 WPT Fallsview Poker Classic in Niagara Falls, Canada.
Elias topped a field of 489 entries to claim his third WPT title, a $15,000 seat in the WPT Championship and CAD $449,484 (USD $335,436).
He also jumped into second place in the current WPT Player of the Year race, behind only front-runner Ben Zamani.
Loeser, Chen Fall Short
It wasn't a total cakewalk to his third title for Elias although at the very end it finished off pretty quickly.
Andrew Chen.
Respected pros Manig Loeser and Andrew Chen made the final table alongside Elias but fell in 5th and 4th, respectively.
Four-handed it was David Eldridge with half the chips in play even but Elias quickly seized control after busting Chen.
Two hands later he had busted Jean-Christophe Ferreira in third and had the chip lead heading into heads-up. Just three hands after that Eldridge was also on the rail and Elias was hoisting his third title.
Complete final-table results and payouts:
1. Darren Elias – C$449,484 ($335,436)*
2. David Eldridge – C$300,982 ($224,613)
3. Jean-Christophe Ferreira – C$193,583 ($144,465)
4. Andrew Chen – C$143,199 ($106,865)
5. Manig Loeser – C$107,399 ($80,149)
6. Abdull Hassan – C$86,184 ($64,316)
Action has already resumed on the World Poker Tour with Day 1A of the LA Poker Classic now underway to begin the famous West Coast Swing.
521 players put up the $10,000 to be in the field in LA and Elias is (was, actually - he's now been eliminated) one of them. An impressive $1m out of the $5m prize pool will go to the winner.
