Friday, 29th March 2024 05:36
Home / Uncategorized / Previewing EPT Malta

Not long ago the European Poker Tour announced there would be a new stop in Malta next March. I was so excited I went for warm-up tournament in Malta this month before going again for the EPT in the spring. It was my first time ever visiting the island country.

The EPT has always excelled when it comes to finding great destinations for events. Just like the other places the EPT goes, Malta is going to be one of those locations where if you’ve busted the tournament you’ll still have a very nice place to explore and enjoy.

I traveled both with my brother who plays smaller stakes and the Polish player Dominik Panka, the PCA champion from the start of this year. Dominik received an award from PokerListings there for being “Rising Star” of 2014, which is well deserved after the year he’s had.

Malta has become a fairly common place for poker players to live, especially online players. Isaac Haxton of Team PokerStars Pro Online is one player who moved there, I know. I have another good friend — someone who has been a Supernova Elite several times — who had lived in the U.K. but who now lives and plays in Malta, and so I stayed with him. Actually that makes me think that EPT Malta might have a number of tough players in the field, given all of the online grinders who live there.

There is a lot of great sightseeing to be done in Malta, which is a place with a lot of history stretching back something like 3,000 years. I believe the first settlers there were from Sicily, but over the years many different countries have had inhabitants there and it was passed around among different nations before becoming independent in 1964. Then later it joined the European Union in 2004.

The island is only 316 square kilometers, so it isn’t that big, but there are lots of places to see. And of course the Mediterranean Sea is very nice with very blue water. The temperatures are supposed to be very mild all year round — never too hot and never too cold.

I’ve been reading Malta being described as one of the best places to live in the world. The only thing I can think of that is missing that I’d like to have are mountains — the highest peak on the island is only 250 meters high. But the coast and other sights make up for that, I think.

Here’s to another new and interesting place to visit and play poker!

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Marcin Horecki is a member of Team PokerStars Pro

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