Side events continue to start at the EPT Prague festival, and they continue to fill all corners of all the many tournament rooms. Another massive €2,000 event has now got under way, with at least 215 players taking their seats. They include Vanessa Selbst and Chen-An Lin of Team PokerStars Pro, plus Dylan Linde, Fedor Holz, Stephen Graner, Jason Wheeler, Ognyan Dimov and Stephen Chidwick.
Chidwick has hopped into this event after being eliminated from the €5,000 PLO, which is taking place in the “Chez Louis” tournament room. That’s an overspill area which has, in the past, hosted weddings, christenings and Rafa Nadal press conferences, but has now been taken over by poker alone. Anybody wishing to tie the knot, baptise a child or introduce a World No 1 tennis player needs to look elsewhere.
The poker phase of the unique “Poker and Chess Mixed Tournament” also took place Chez Louis today. Events of that kind have been highly successful on the UKIPT, particularly at the Mind Sports Festival in the Isle of Man.
The general gist is that players determine the size of their starting stack in a poker event by first doing battle in a series of chess games. Each of the 22 players registered are guaranteed 10,000 tournament chips, but earn another 2,000 chips for each of five chess matches they play.
The International Master Gaby Livshitz won all of his matches so started with the biggest stack in the poker tournament. John Field and Vladislav Flek, who can both play chess but were mainly in the tournament for its fun component, started the poker tournament with 10,000 chips. That’s the diplomatic way to describe how they got on in the chess.
There’s €1,800 on offer for the winner. It cost €200 to play.
There were 55 players in the seniors’ event, which required €1,000 and a passport pre-dating December 12, 1965 to play. Jean Noel-Thorel, who has both of those, opted to skip it, however, and was also spotted in the field of the €5,000 PLO.
The Womens Event also started today and attracted 63 players, paying €200 each. They will pay to 11 and the winner will get €4,584. The field includes Sara Chafak and Ana Marquez.
We’re keeping up with the side events action on the side events page and the results are on the side events results page.
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