Celebrating the 100th event in their storied history, the European Poker Tour kicked off its Season 11 schedule on Thursday at the Casino Barcelona in Spain. With a field that would be applicable for the final day of a multi-start day field, poker professional Michael Mizrachi emerged on top at the end of the day.
From the start of the action on Day 1A, it was obvious that this wasn’t going to be a small starting field. Perhaps because of the momentous occasion that is the 100th tournament in the EPT history, such names as Barny Boatman, Vitaly Lunkin, Dylan Linde, Paul Volpe, Dominik Nitsche, David Vamplew and Team PokerStars Pros Thor Hansen, Leo Margets, Johnny Lodden and Eugene Katchalov all were in attendance for the opening deal. They were soon joined by Shannon Shorr, Juha Helppi, Roberto Romanello, Jonathan Little and Marvin Rettenmaier to take part in the festivities.
There was only one notable casualty through the early play. David Levy committed the remainder of his stack on an 8-5-2 flop, only to see his pocket Aces crushed by his opponents pocket deuces that had found a set. Levy was soon joined by such players as Vanessa Selbst, Jean-Robert Bellande and Oleksii Khoroshenin. With 475 players at the close of late registration, however, there were plenty of storylines to watch.
The story of the Day 1A action was that of Mizrachi, whose stack only seemed to go up throughout the day. Within the first couple hours of play, Mizrachi had built up an 87K stack (nearly three times the starting stack) after hitting a flush against Stephen Chidwick and continued to charge through the field as night fell on the Spanish coast. In nailing trip Queens on a 3-Q-9-8-Q board, “The Grinder” smashed through the 100K mark (122K, to be exact) and kept the momentum going in flopping quad eights to approach the 160K barrier.
This was the theme throughout Mizrachi’s Day 1A battles as it never seemed that he lost a significant amount of chips. In taking out Chaofei Wang with pocket nines over Wang’s K-Q off suit, Mizrachi hit 175K in chips and, by the end of the evening’s play, sat on an impressive stack of 186,600, which was good for the Day 1A chip lead.
1. Michael Mizrachi, 186,600
2. Charlie Combes, 172,400
3. Dmitry Yurasov, 163,100
4. Maksim Semisoshenko, 149,000
5. Marko Neumann, 146,200
6. Umberto Vitagliano, 142,000
7. Ori Miller, 140,000
8. Andreas Eriksson, 139,000
9. Bryn Kenney, 129,000
10. Jose Goncalves Pinheiro, 122,000
Other notable names with a decent stack include Marc-Andre Ladouceur (113,700), Max Pescatori (91,500), Lodden (89,500), Pierre Neuville (82,300) and Hansen (77,400).
It is definitely too early to even consider this but, if Mizrachi is able to go wire-to-wire and take down the EPT Barcelona, he would join the exclusive poker “Triple Crown” club. With his multiple World Poker Tour championship and World Series of Poker bracelets already under his belt, the only jewel left in the Crown is an EPT victory. Don’t think that this won’t motivate “The Grinder” to be at the top of his game.
279 players survived the first Day One of the EPT Barcelona, but it is expected that the Day 1B field will be even larger than Thursday’s starting grid. With the €5000 buy in, the prize pool has already eclipsed the €2.3 million mark and, with an expected turnout on Friday that might push the tournament field to 1000 players or more, it is conceivable that the final prize pool may total over €5 million and should earn the champion a potential €1 million payday.
