Ivan Polanco stayed out of trouble for much of the final table, remaining content to take down the small pots and let other players go broke in big confrontations.
Finally, after weaving his way to heads-up play against Andrew Zhu, a short-stacked Polanco made his stand with . Unfortunately for him, Zhu had a dominating hand with , and the final board came down to leave him with the second-best hand.
After a total of 242 entries and reentries were recorded in this $300 Deeper-Stack NLHE tournament, generating a prize pool of $61,033, Andrew Zhu took down top honors along with $17,092 in winnings.
With the poker world's elite eyeing a spot in tomorrow's $15,400 buy-in, $5 Million Guaranteed WPT World Championship event, and participating in round-the-clock satellites throughout the day trying to win their seat on the cheap, today's field was mostly filled with local grinders. Easter Sunday and another holiday celebrated by some likely culled the field even more, but nonetheless there were plenty of familiar faces in attendance looking to take their shot.
Papa Levy, Attilio Bitondo, Wendy Rubin, Philip Neiman and Emad Alabsi - all of whom final tabled earlier events on the Borgata Spring Poker Open schedule - came to play, along with regulars on the local circuit like Olga Petrovskaya, Brian Rosengarten and Armando Then. Alabsi managed to reach yet another final table after winning Event 8 for $12,629, but he fell in 6th place to add another $3,052 to his haul for the series.