According to Marcin Horecki, his second table of Day 1B at EPT Prague has been “polarising”. There are, in his words, “six regs” and “four soft spots” — and Mickey Petersen is there too.
Taking a stroll through the tournament room as level four came to a close, it seemed like the entire field was split down the middle, but with slightly different categorisation to that described by Horecki.
On the one hand there were “Players Who Have Won An EPT Main Event” and on the other there were “Players Who Have Inexplicably Not Won An EPT Main Event”. In other words, there were stars here and stars there, everywhere one looked.
This is the midpoint of Day 1B and the tournament information board says that 595 players have joined the action. Registration is open until tomorrow morning, but even if no one else enters, we have already got ourselves a record field. Combined with yesterday’s 389, EPT10 Prague is already 984-players strong. It’s becoming Barcelona-esque.
It is all but impossible to be confident of the chip leader at this stage, but Eduards Kudrjavcevs’s 98,000 has to be there or thereabouts. Our colleagues dwelling in the live reporting panel at the top of our EPT Prague Main Event page have Jonathan Roy at their chip-count summit, with 83,000. But the unpronounceable Latvian has more than that, even after he lost a pot of about 10,000 bluffing into the queens of Joe Mouawad (not that one).
Christian Golob, of Austria, had about 74,000 at last count, while Luca Pagano was tweeting that there was 68,000 chips, plus Dario Sammartino, plus Roger Hairabedian in front of him. Perhaps Pagano hadn’t noticed Chris Moorman to his right (or had just preferred not to see the online No 1).
Salvatore Bonavena, a former EPT Prague champion, took a step away from the table, and a stack of 54,000, to chat with a friend. That will have brought him to the attention of Andrew Chen (44,000) a few seats down, the man who could only stare on forlornly from the spectacular Season 5 final table owned by Bonavena. (Chen finished third.)
David Vamplew (18,000) sits next to ElkY (45,000). Gaelle Baumann sat opposite Jamila Von Perger. If Robin Ylitalo is going to go back-to-back, he’ll have to survive unscathed from his table featuring the unpredictable Micah Raskin.
Other former champion in the field include Ludovic Lacay (55,000), Davidi Kitai (44,000), Mikolai Pobol and Liv Boeree. Team Online’s Isaac Haxton (48,000) and Marc-Andre Ladouceur (31,000) are also in there.
Daniel Negreanu is yukking it up over on the EPT Live table. But several others have already had to hit Twitter to vent about their exits. Max Lykov hit the rail only minutes after arriving, running kings into aces, flopping a set but then watching his opponent do the same.
Martin Hruby also got involved in a cooler. He had aces but they were, according to his Twitter, “< KK". Ouch.
For coverage of Day 1B of the Main Event, head to the EPT Prague Main Event page. There’s hand-by-hand coverage and chip counts in the top panel, plus feature pieces below the line. All the information about event can be found on the main European Poker Tour website.
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