The summer is poker's peak season, with almost two full months of action in Las Vegas highlighted by some of the biggest prize pools and most coveted trophies.
In what's become a star-studded kickoff to the proceedings, the Super High Roller Bowl, a $300,000 buy-in tournament, has crowned one of the biggest winners of the year each of the last three years. Thursday, the tournament saw its third champion, Christoph Vogelsang, take home $6 million at the ARIA Resort & Casino.
Vogelsang came from behind to defeat prohibitive favorite Jake Schindler during the final day's three-handed session to walk away with the biggest tournament cash of his career.
"I'm just happy and it came unexpectedly, because I didn't have a lot of chips and was up against a really good player." Vogelsang said. "I kind of thought ahead to heads-up play, last night I looked at the odd of making heads-up and I thought I was only 15 percent to not make it," he continued. "It's great, I feel good. It's such a great tournament -- it's got the best structure ever and the ARIA is doing such an amazing job and I hope I can play here again."
Vogelsang is the second consecutive German champion of this event, following Rainer Kempe in that distinction. Brian Rast, who's also a two-time champion of the World Series of Poker's $50,000 Poker Players Championship, won the inaugural event in 2015.
This isn't the first high-profile multi-million dollar cash for the 31-year-old German pro. Vogelsang's most prolific result to date came in the 2014 WSOP Big One for One Drop, a $1 million buy-in tournament in which he placed third for $4,480,001.
The 2017 Super High Roller Bowl final table featured a number of WSOP bracelet winners including Justin Bonomo, Jason Koon and Byron Kaverman, as well as 2002 Scripps National Spelling Bee winner Pratyush Buddiga. The early stages of the tournament were highlighted by the inclusion of actor Kevin Hart, who knocked 14-time WSOP bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth out of the $300,000 tournament in a set-over-set situation.
The entirety of the tournament aired on Poker Central's new "PokerGO" streaming service, which will begin airing footage of the 2017 World Series of Poker on Saturday afternoon. They will be carrying live streaming coverage of the series throughout the summer, leading up to the $10,000 main event that closes out the series.
In partnership with ESPN, Poker Central will air live footage of every day of the main event both on ESPN and ESPN2, and on PokerGO.
Final Table Results
Christoph Vogelsang - $6,000,000
Jake Schindler - $3,600,000
Stefan Schillhabel - $2,400,000
Leon Tsoukernik - $1,800,000
Byron Kaverman - $1,400,000
Pratyush Buddiga - $1,000,000
Justin Bonomo - $600,000
Jason Koon - $60,000