There are many methods by which one can measure the scale of this festival, including (but not limited to) opening the Excel spreadsheet bearing all the names and then wearing your index finger to the bone while scrolling through it.
Another way is to simply look at the list of late arrivals, the 18 players who left it to the last moment to join the €5,300 Main Event, ie, the start of Day 2. They offer a distillation of the talent in the field.
Here are those folk, and you may recognise one or two names among them:
Jason Mo, United States
Anton Astapau, Belarus
Zhapar Sultanov, Kazakhstan
Mihai Popa, Romania
Jens Kyllonen, Finland
Niklas Astedt, Sweden
Ilari Sahamies, Finland
Haralabos Voulgaris, Canada
Henri Jaakkola, Finland
Ambrose Ng, Canada
Farid Jattin, United States
Liv Boeree, United Kingdom
Vadzim Markushevski, Belarus
Ville Mattila, Finland
Jose Carlos Garcia, Poland
Wilfried Harig, Germany
Dzmitry Urbanovich, Poland
Denis Ursu, Moldova
Mo and Astapau both played the €50,000 Super High Roller and the €25,000 one-day High Roller tournament, and Voulgaris played the former. Boeree, meanwhile, is a late arrival to the Main Event because her week in Barcelona has been hectic even by her heady schedule.
On Day 1A of the Main Event, the Team PokerStars Pro was going through a familiar routine of interviews. On Day 1B, she spent the morning fly-boarding with the PokerStars VIP Club and then came back to the casino to play the €25,000 single-day high roller.
At 5am, she was still involved in that tournament, into the final three, and guaranteed a pay-day of €391,000. There is, however, €865,900 for first. It seems that Boeree may have not lasted too long in the main event. She is, at time of writing, missing in action.
Among the other big names in that concentrated list of talent, we find two famous Finns: Jens Kyllonen and Ilari Sahamies. Kyllonen is a former EPT Copenhagen champion, while Sahamies is still known as Ziigmund and was a hero in Barcelona on Season 9.
Oh yes, and there’s Dzmitry Urbanovich too, the reigning EPT Player of the Year. Urbanovich has grown accustomed to late registering events, largely because he is pretty much always among the late finishers in all of the other tournaments.
Here he finished second in the €50,000 Super High Roller, so is more than €800,000 up for the week already. Now he is trying to spin his 37 big blinds into another few hundred thousand euros.
The tournament administrators now need to go through the process of figuring out precisely how many entries we have. It’s not quite so easy as adding up all the players in the room, as there are usually a few no shows, who have bought in or qualified online and then not arrived.
It’ll take a few hours until we know for certain, but it’s already 1,691 at least.
You can follow all the action from the various tournament floors on PokerStars Blog. The Main Event action will be on the Main Event page. And everything from the side events is on the side events page. It will be busy over there today.
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.
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