2009 November 21 Poker News, Events and Happenings
With rainclouds lingering along the Portuguese coastline, the remaining 24 players were back inside the cozy confines of the casino today for Day 4 of the PokerStars.com European Poker Tour Vilamoura. And did they ever come to play. With each of…
One of poker’s top tournament directors is the Bellagio’s Jack McClelland, master of ceremonies for some of the game’s top events. Gearing up for the World Poker Tour’s (WPT) Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic, McClelland sat down with Poker News Daily to discuss the state of the poker tournament world.
One of the new stops on Season Six of the European Poker Tour (EPT) was a November jaunt to Vilamoura, Portugal. The tournament, which got underway on November 17th, drew 322 runners, making it the third largest EPT Main Event of the season so far.
A number of familiar faces made the trip to Portugal including Team PokerStars players Chad Brown, Jason Mercier and Katja Thater as well as Shaun Deeb, Jason Lavallee, Andy Black, Ludovic Lacay and Ross Boatman. The event featured a €5,000 + €300 buy-in and promises a first place prize of €404,793, or roughly $600,000. The Vilamoura stop is one of several new destinations on the tournament and it has already outperformed one of the other new additions to the tour, the August stop in Kiev.
The final table of the event is set to play out on Sunday and, at time of writing, there are still four eliminations to go on Saturday before play ends for the day. Friday’s Day 3 proved to be a short one as the field began with 69 players and stopped a little early once the field was trimmed to 24. Typically play slows as players near the money bubble, with tables going hand-for-hand to avoid stalling. At the Vilamoura event, play did not even make it to hand-for hand before Sergey Lebedev was knocked out in 49th place to burst the bubble and play continued at a hectic pace until only the final three tables remained.
Those who survived to Day 4 on Saturday included chip leader Anthony Lellouche, Team PokerStars Pros Jude Ainsworth of Ireland and Ruben Visser of the Netherlands, Jim “MrBigQueso” Collopy, Ryan “HITTHEPANDA” Franklin and seven Portugese players,a including Joao Barbosa.
Lellouche began the day in a familiar role, serving as the tournament chip leader with over 1.1 million chips. He ended Day 2 second in chips and also logged some time as the chipleader earlier this EPT season at the Warsaw stop. It looked as though Lellouche would be in great position to make his fourth career EPT final table, but an aggressive play early in the day found him on the rail in 20th place. After action on every street, Lellouche moved all-in on the river with the board reading J-8-2-Q-2 and Antonio Matias called, showing A-2 for rivered trips. Lellouche held just 7-9 for a missed gutshot straight draw and was eliminated.
Matias amassed a huge chip lead as a result of the hand and only built on it as Day 4 progressed. With just 12 players left, Matias holds 2.3 million chips—nearly a million more than his next closest competitor, Jeff Sarwer of Canada, who has almost 1.4 million chips. There is a wide discrepancy between these two players and the rest of the field, as Claudio Coelho is third in chips with just 750,000.
Joining Lellouche on the rail today were Collopy, Barbosa, Visser and Ainsworth. The back to back eliminations of Visser and Ainsworth in 13th and 12th places respectively means there will be no PokerStars pros appearing at the Vilamoura final table, though PokerStars online qualifiers Santiago Terrazas and Pierre Neuville are still in contention for the title.
Play in Vilamoura will continue until the final 8-handed table is set. Players will then have the night off before returning at 12PM local time to play down to the newest EPT champion.
The finale of the Full Tilt Poker Million Dollar Challenge in London featured sponsored pro Tom “durrrr” Dwan taking Sammy “Any Two” George for a colossal $750,000. Dwan entered the contest up over $40,000 after facing Marcello “luckexpress” Marigliano and Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies.
In posts that appeared on the online poker forums PocketFives.com and TwoPlusTwo.com, a preliminary 2010 World Series of Poker (WSOP) schedule may have been leaked. The link to the schedule has since been removed.
The 2009 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Playa Conchal concluded its second day of action on Friday. At the beginning of the day, 119 players returned to the felt after having made it through from Day 1 and when things were all said and…
The race to a $15,000 package to the 2010 Aussie Millions continues thanks to PartyPoker and PokerNews. The next qualifier begins tomorrow (Novebember 22, 14:35 GMT)…
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