Rui Cao Tops FTP This Week

French poker player Rui Cao ruled the roost on Full Tilt Poker this week with nearly $300k in profit.

Since online poker’s Black Friday, Patrik Antonius and Gus Hansen have been the two big name pros making most of the headlines on the site but they were not as active this week.

Cao moved in and utterly dominated the $25/$50 PLO games, winning $202k on Monday alone. The Parisian added another $100k throughout the week and finished with a total of $297k.

He’s now up $911k in 2011 and with the absence of American players such as Tom “durrrr” Dwan, Phil Ivey and Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond, is becoming one of the rising stars in the online poker world.

As good as he played this week, Cao was technically not the biggest winner. That honor went to the lesser-known vmnielsen who picked up $307k in 2,309 hands on PokerStars this week.

Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies also finally smashed his way into the winner’s circle with $161k in profit. The Finnish pro is still down over $600k but he now has something to build on.

Other big winners over the last week included KidPoker705 (+$152k) and LuckyGump (+$147k). KidPoker705 is not Daniel Negreanu but rather a Full Tilt player.

Meanwhile antonionel, which is rumored to be the account of Romanian businessman Anton Ionel, took massive damage this week losing a total of $349k.

On the bright side Ionel did finish third for $1.3 million in this year’s 2011 PCA so there’s a good chance he can afford it.

Ionel did have some company as samrostan (-$155k), le kork (-$133k), KOMIJENDO (-$117k) and anna164 (-$115k) all had miserable weeks of online poker.

Jens “Ingenious89” Kyllonen also saw his recent hot streak cooled considerably as he lost $106k.

For more information on the high stakes games this week be sure to check our online poker stats section.