While PokerStars has been one of the best Euro poker sites for a while, they have just started breaking into the Asian market. The Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) recently made a stop in Macau, one of the biggest poker cities in Asia.

The news was big early in the event as Phil Ivey was seen at one of the tables. This high profile pro hadn’t been seen in a live tournament since Black Friday, which was on April 15th of this year! Whether it was due to rust or just bad luck, Ivey didn’t go deep in the event. Perhaps he spent too much time with online casino gambling and not enough time with poker during his break?

A grand total of 575 players created a prize pool of 15,552,600 HKD after paying 30,000 HKD each to enter. This meant that first prize was 3,772,000 HKD, which is equivalent to a little under half a million dollars in the U.S.

When the final table was formed, the big name remaining was that of Randy Lew. He came to the table with just 20bb, which meant he was the short stack. Quickly after the final table started, he got his chips in the middle with QQ. David Steicke made the easy call with AA.

It wasn’t Steicke’s day, however. A queen came on the flop, which severely crippled his stack. He was unable to recover and was the first elimination of the final table in 9th place.

Armed with a deeper stack, Lew used his experience and expertise to build his stack even more. His stack then received another considerable increase when he got dealt TT and beat A4 to bust Kai Yat Fam in 6th place.

Lew made it to heads-up with a slight chip lead over Jimmy Pan. He relinquished the chip lead to Pan at one point during the match, but then got it back by winning a flip. The final hand saw Lew win the match after flopping top two versus Pan’s top pair.

Congratulations to Lew for winning APPT Macau! Lew is well known for generating incredible amounts of PokerStars rakeback, but this win has proved that he is also a force to be reckoned with in live events, as well.