Chris Moore Wins LA Poker Classic Heads-Up Championship

Moore is poker’s official Second Chance Man after winning in Los Angeles

After making the finals of the LA Poker Classic $9,700 Heads-Up Championship, Chris Moore was within one round of having a deja vu moment at Commerce Casino last night. He found himself advancing from the winner’s bracket in this double-elimination event to take on Vivek Rajkumar, who emerged as the last man standing from the loser’s bracket – oddly enough, the exact same final matchup as last year’s inaugural running of the event. But Moore, never one to accept the same result twice, avoided a repeat and managed to defeat Rajkumar in one round to win the event.

With just 37 entries the field for this year’s heads-up championship was quite a bit smaller than the 111-player crowd from the 2009 LA Poker Classic, mostly owing to the presence of the NAPT Venetian up the highway in Las Vegas. In fact, Moore’s first-place prize for defeating Rajkumar this year was smaller than the $190,000 he took home as runner-up last year when the young man known online as “psyduck” beat him in back-to-back matches. Moore won’t be complaining about the result anytime soon, though – it marks his second career tournament victory and was still worth $147,200.

This isn’t the first time that Chris Moore has almost won a poker tournament one year and then come the next year to improve on his finish. In 2007 he took third place in the Wynn Classic main event only to return in 2008 and win the tournament, his first major live event victory. If he’s actually in some sort of revenge pattern, players at the upcoming WPT Bay 101 main event in San Jose will want to be wary: Moore took third place there in 2009.

His LAPC winner interview with Tournament Director Matt Savage is below: