Fifty-two big blinds against seventy, and the shorter stack won. Vladimir Minko took GGPoker’s $10,000 GGMillion$ on Tuesday, November 3, beating Juan Dominguez heads-up for $404,362, his second title in the event. For Dominguez the $311,806 for second came with a footnote PokerNews was careful to print: it would have been his sixth GGMillion$ win.
The field was 202 entries, 35 fewer than the week before, when Fabiano Kovalski won for $464,794. The prize pool was not stated in the report, so the record carries the entries and the nine published payouts and leaves the pool blank. Ninth place was worth $50,545, which is the floor every finalist had locked up at the close of Day 1 on Sunday; the final table was played for the $353,817 between that and first.
The final table
Minko started the last day third in chips behind Dominguez and Artem Osmirko. Yahor Dambrouski of Mexico went out first, calling off a short stack with pocket eights into David Kaufmann’s kings, for $50,545. Juho Suutari of Finland was eighth ($65,549) with sixes against Dominguez’s eights, and Artur Martirosian of Armenia seventh ($85,006) after losing top pair to Kaufmann’s aces and then king-seven to Osmirko’s nines.
The Finnish screen name Unelmavavy, who had cracked Martirosian’s kings with ace-king, was sixth ($110,240) after five-bet shoving ace-four of clubs into Dominguez’s ace-king. Sebastian Gaehl of Austria check-raised all-in with ace-ten on a jack-ten-jack flop and ran into Kaufmann’s queen-jack for fifth ($142,963). Osmirko, who had won this event in July, open-shoved ace-queen for eleven big blinds and lost to Minko’s ace-jack when a jack flopped and another turned; he took $185,401 for fourth.
Three-handed play lasted more than seventy minutes with Kaufmann in front for most of it, until Dominguez took two large pots off him, king-queen over king-jack and then jack-nine over pocket tens. Kaufmann took $240,435 for third, the second Austrian on a GGMillion$ podium in two weeks after Hannes Jeschka’s third place for $276,368 on October 27.
Heads-up
Dominguez began the match with 12,206,940 to Minko’s 9,040,060, seventy big blinds to fifty-two. Minko won the first large pots and had the lead when the last hand came: Dominguez min-raised jack-ten of clubs, Minko moved all-in with ace-three, Dominguez called off his last 22 big blinds, and the ace-high held. There was no deal.
Two titles, one flag, two descriptions
PokerNews puts Minko’s GGPoker tournament earnings past $19,000,000, with more than $3,300,000 of it from GGMillion$ events, and calls him Russian in the text. The results table, which the outlet says reproduces the GGPoker lobby, lists him as Mexico, as it does Dambrouski. The record on this site follows the table, since the lobby flag is what the room published, and notes the description in the text beside it. The desk does not resolve a player’s nationality; it records what the sources say and where they differ.
The second-place money is the other number worth keeping. Dominguez’s $311,806 is more than the first prize of most GGMillion$ finals in the sources on file, and his five titles in the event are the most of anyone named on this ledger. A sixth would have been a record the desk could have cited; the five remain a figure from PokerNews rather than from the room, and the series page says so.