The finale for its Season 12 schedule, the European Poker Tour’s Grand Final has exceeded expectations on the coast of the Mediterranean. After two Day Ones, the largest EPT Grand Final field of 1068 players had come to the tables in the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco (potentially with more to come), making the EPT bosses look brilliant in lowering the buy in for the tournament from its former traditional €10,000 to its price in 2016 of €5000.
Day 1A arose bright and sunny on Saturday with 286 players coming to the tables to stake their claim European poker’s biggest prize. The mixture of satellite winners was punctuated with the appearance of a significant tournament professional, but it was the showing of one of football’s best players that seemed to excite many in the tournament arena. Team PokerStars SportsStar Cristiano Ronaldo was on hand to take his shot at poker superstardom, which was a bit odd because his Real Madrid team will be hosting Manchester City on Wednesday in a Champions League match – what would he do if he were to make a deep run in the Grand Final? That question won’t have to be answered, unfortunately; Ronaldo would lose a big hand off the bat and never get back over his starting stack, falling before the close of Level 1.
Ronaldo wasn’t the only big name among the crowd on Saturday. “Gentleman” John Gale, Fabian Quoss, Antoine Saout, Isaac Haxton, Sergey Lebedev, Justin Bonomo and former Grand Final champion Mohsin Charania were all on hand in the midst of Level 1, but former Grand Final victor Ivan Freitez, Huy Pham and Aleh Yurkin would join Ronaldo on the rail. By the end of the night, Roman Verenko had stacked up 198,000 in chips to assume the Day 1A chip lead, but such players as Jake Cody, Faraz Jaka, Mike Watson, a Patrik Antonius sighting and Gale all were among those to move on to Day 2 on Monday.
With such a large field for the Day 1A action, it was expected that Day 1B would be massive and the players didn’t disappoint. 487 players were on the counter for the call of “shuffle up and deal,” offering the potential for the 2016 EPT Grand Final to the biggest in the EPT’s history (Season 5’s 935 runners in the Grand Final was the previous record, although it has to be noted that the buy in then was €10,000). By the time dinner arrived, a total of 779 players had been added to the player roster and, at the end of the night, three more entries brought the overall total to 782 runners for Day 1B. There is a possibility that more players may still enter into the tournament – late registration is open until the start of action on Day 2 Monday – but the 1068 total players for the 2016 EPT Grand Final is the biggest turnout in history.
As the adage states, you can’t win a poker tournament on the first day, but you can certainly lose one. There were several players who demonstrated the truthfulness of that adage as they will not be returning on Monday for any more play in the Grand Final. Guillaume Darcourt, Lee Markholt, Andrey Zaichenko, Bruno Fitoussi, Luca Pagano, Yury Gulyy and James Akenhead won’t be back, but one elimination in particular caught the eye of many in the room.
Entering after the dinner break, Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu played the very first hand he was dealt and picked up some chips from opponent Markku Koplimaa. On the very next hand, the duo would clash again on a K-5-9-7-J board and Negreanu called off his final chips after Koplimaa bet out Negreanu’s exact stack. ‘Kid Poker’s’ A-K looked nice, but it fell to Koplimaa’s 8-6 for the turned straight. In the span of two hands, the all-time winningest player in poker history was gone from the EPT Grand Final.
The room was abuzz with the man who marched to the top of the chip standings by the end of the night. Seemingly making no mistakes as he stormed through the day, Albert Daher was able to amass a 266,600 chip stack to take the overall chip lead. Complete stats for Day 1B aren’t available as of yet so a formal chip count isn’t available either, but it is thought that Daher, Sebastien Lebaron and Kulli Sidhu are the top three players at this point.
Day 2 will kick off on Monday afternoon with around 585 players still remaining in the tournament. The reduced buy-in will probably keep the first place prize down a bit, but the prestige of taking the EPT Grand Final will still be cherished by the player who achieves that goal. The champion will be crowned on Friday, concluding the Season 12 schedule for the EPT.