In case you missed our news stories on the Full Tilt vs PokerStars challenge last week - we recommend that you check them out before continuing. Now, the match between Full Tilt Poker's The Professionals and Team PokerStars Pro took place yesterday at EPT London. In the first match Viktor "Isildur1" Blom (Full Tilt Poker) was up against Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier from Team PokerStars Pro...
Blom vs Grospellier
Many expected the young Swede to win this match as he's a much more experienced NLHE player than ElkY. Besides that, many cosider him to be the world's best No-Limit Hold'em heads-up player. However, to everyone's surprise, the Frenchman played extremely well and had defeated "Isildur1" on all three tables in about 30 minutes time. A huge dissapointment for Blom's fans. Let's hope that he will do better online at Full Tilt Poker this week.
Next up was the match between Isaac Haxton and Tom "durrrr" Dwan...
Haxton talked about this match in an interview last week. He was pretty confident that he was the better of the two and that he would win relatively easy.
Haxton ended up taking down the first match in no-time, but then he lost the second match to Dwan. Tom Dwan now had the chance to even out the scores to 1-1...
After some time of battle in the deciding match, Dwan was down to 1200 chips from 3000 chips (starting stack) and went all in with AJ. Haxton snap-called with AA and the board was no good for Dwan.
At this point PokerStars had a 2-0 lead against Full Tilt Poker and had already taken down the challenge. In other words, the last match between Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu (the two organisers of the challenge) was a match of pride and nothing else.
Hansen vs Negreanu
Hansen started well and took the lead on all three tables, but Negreanu also played well and eventually took down a huge pot which left "The Great Dane" with only 40 chips; Both players flopped a pair of 9s when the money went in - Gus with Q9 vs Negreanu's 89. An 8 came on the turn and the river card was to no help for Mr. Hansen. Negreanu won the remaining 40 chips in the next hand.
Hansen, however, still had decent leads on the other two tables after losing everything on that table. He had Negreanu down to 400 chips (1 table) at one point, but the Canadian poker pro (once again) had the poker gods on his side as he ended up winning a few all ins and overtook the lead. Then it didn't take long before the two poker stars were all in - Negreanu with KK and Hansen with JJ. Negreanu's kings held up all the way to the river and the scores were Negreanu 2 - Hansen 0. Hansen didn't seem to care about the last table, because he shoved his remaining ships with J9 and Negreanu called with AK. Negreanu rivered an ace high flush and the challenge was officially over.
source: highstakesdb
