Thursday, 28th March 2024 11:48
Home / Uncategorized / EPT11 London: Koren receives a blessing (mixed, at best)

Here’s a small vignette that doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but won’t make it to the TV edit, so is worth relating now.

Ole Schemion, who has one of contemporary poker’s most decisive Midas touches (just ask Andre Lettau), wandered over from the £10,000 High Roller event to have a quick chat with his countryman Artur Koren.

They nattered away for a while, umlauts spraying across the airwaves like crumbs from a sandwich, and then Schemion hopped on his cloud again and scooted away. Koren re-focused and waited for his next hand to be dealt.

It just so happened that he was in the big blind and then something significantly weirder happened. Everybody at the table — which includes Simon Deadman, Fatima Moreira de Melo and Raffaele Sorrentino — folded to his big blind. Yep, it was the lesser-spotted walk, something you almost never see any more on the European Poker Tour, much less when the field is down to its final four tables and everybody left is a button-mashing lunatic.

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Artur Koren: A walk

Koren announced to his opponents that he didn’t like to look at his cards when he gets a walk in the big blind and so picked them up and displayed them to his table-mates instead, at an angle where he could only see the backs.

“Aces!” Deadman said. “I said they’d be aces.”

And aces they were. Old Midas Schemion had decreed that two red bullets should find their way to Koren’s hand, and no doubt he would have made a decent profit had everybody else not been frightened away.

Follow our coverage of the EPT London festival via the main EPT London page, where there are hand-by-hand updates and chip counts in the panel at the top and feature pieces below. And, of course, you can follow it all live at EPT Live.

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