The 12th season of the European Poker Tour is officially one day old. After an awful lot of very high volume preliminaries, which comprised the bulk of the Estrellas Poker Festival, Edgar Stuchly took to the microphone around noon today and officially welcomed EPT players to the fray.
And, of course, in they all came. This time last year, a new record was set for players at an EPT Main Event. Eventually 1,496 showed up, but “only” 475 played Day 1A. Today, there were at least 459, so we’re on track for something very similar.
At the end of the first eight levels, Imad Derwiche bagged the most, but he should not be getting carried away. Michael Mizrachi held the chip lead at this stage yesterday and he was out of contention long before the bubble burst.
While Derwiche, of course, who finished runner up to Charlie Carrel at the €25,000 High Roller in Monaco, will hope to avoid that fate, and has 170,000 at this stage, he will know how choppy the waters can get from here on. Among the chasing pack he will spot Martin Vallo (163,300), Patrik Antonius (103,800) and the likes of David Yan (95,100), John Juanda (89,300), Mustapha Kanit (83,200) and Isaac Haxton (79,200) nestled among this little bunch of names:
Imad Derwiche, 170000
Martin Vallo, 163300
Jesse Liljegren, 153100
Vladimir Troyanovskiy, 115600
Patrik Antonius, 103800
David Yan, 95100
John Juanda, 89300
Mustapha Kanit, 83200
Charlie Carrel, 79300
Isaac Haxton, 79200
Sebastian Pauli, 78400
David Vamplew, 75300
Leo Fernandez, 74700
Naoya Kihara, 69400
Benjamin Pollak, 68000
Dong Kim, 66000
Leo Margets, 55300
Jason Gray, 49900
Kevin MacPhee, 48700
Antonio Buonanno, 43000
Byron Kaverman, 41000
Anthony Zinno, 37200
Christoph Vogelsang, 33900
Sam Greenwood, 31200
Stephen Chidwick, 20500
Martin Jacobson, 18300
Mike McDonald, 17400
Theo Jorgensen joined the action full of confidence for the day ahead. But the Team PokerStars Pro from Denmark was one of the first to bust.
That seemed to start a race to the door for some of poker’s brightest lights as Jason Mercier, George Danzer, Max Silver, Adrian Mateos, Ole Schemion, Andrew Chen, Paul Newey, Martin Finger, Erik Seidel, David Peters and Jonathan Little all freed themselves up for a crack at tomorrow’s €25,000 one-day event.
What’s that you say? They could have played that anyway? Ah hell, it’s too late now.
Anyhow, that’s broadly how Day 1A played out at this year’s EPT Barcelona Main Event. Of course, speaking strictly in poker terms, it’s only half a day old. Tomorrow is another day. Day 1B to be precise. And there will likely be close to 1,000 showing up.
Look back on all the action from the various tournament floors on PokerStars Blog. The Main Event action will be on the Main Event page. We also finished the Super High Roller, details of which are on the Super High Roller page.
The Estrellas Main Event also played its final table. Action from that was on the side events page.
You can also begin plotting your own bid for EPT glory by downloading the PokerStars client and having a crack. Follow this EPT event via the EPT app. There you will get all the latest news, chip counts and payouts. You can download it on Android or IOS.
Back to Top
