The Bellagio in Las Vegas was a busy place last weekend as two premiere poker events – the WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic and the WPT Alpha8 Las Vegas were playing down to winners. The week long World Poker Tour (WPT) Five Diamond World Poker Classic tournament has finally come to an end. This year the tournament attracted 586 entrants in comparison to 449 the year before. A prize pool of $5,682,200 was created of which more than $1.4 million was reserved for the winner. From the poker tycoons who took part in this event, Mohsin Charania emerged as the winner and engraved his name for the second time on the WPT Champions Club.
Before the winner of the WPT Five Diamond was crowned, the event also shaped a front page news with Daniel Negreanu made consecutive re-entries to the final table after buying in five times, though he ended up finishing at 25th place for $36,947. In 2013, Charania outplayed a huge chip disadvantage to won WPT Grand Prix de Paris, and surprisingly parallel victory took place at the Bellagio this year. Charania, who fall to as low as 1.55 million, managed to double four times to make his place back into the competition. It started with Hand #180 where he doubled for a fifth for his Pocket Threes held against the Ace and King of Greer, who was left with just three big blinds after the hand.
Four hands later, Greer was holding the Pocket Twos and Charania called with 9 and 6. The flop was Q 10 8 and Charania a straight draw to go which he didn’t hit it on the turn 4, rather he opted for playing when J spiked on the river. A weaker cards saw victory sneaking away from Greer, and he ended up winning at second place with a consolation prize of $869,683. With the first-place finish, Charania got his hands over the prize money of $1,477,890 , which includes a $15,400 seat into the season-ending championship.
2014 WPT Alpha8 was the largest ever event in the history of WPT. WPT Alpha8 Las Vegas tournament had a buy-in of $100,000 and attracted 55 poker enthusiasts which created a prize pool of $5,395,500. This 3-day long event saw the poker biggie Andrew “Lucky Chewy” Lichtenberger scoring at first place to win the first-place prize of $2,104,245.
The top place finishers of WPT Five Diamond Poker Classic:
| Place | Player | Prize |
| 1 | Mohsin Charania | $1,477,890 |
| 2 | Garrett Greer | $869,683 |
| 3 | Brett Shaffer | $562,736 |
| 4 | Ryan Julius | $383,684 |
| 5 | Ryan Fee | $272,842 |
| 6 | Tobias Reinkemeier | $218,842 |