It took four days of play until a winner had been crowned in Event #53: $1,500 No-Limit Hold'em. The winner, Brett Shaffer from USA, bested a field of 2,816 players and defeated British poker pro David Vamplew, who earned his second 2nd place finish of the series, in a heads-up battle that lasted 23 hands to collect his first bracelet and a whopping $665,397!
1 Brett Shaffer $665,397 2 David Vamplew $413,157 3 Arttu Raekorpi $291,392 4 Loni Harwood $210,456 5 Mike Watson $153,850 6 Deigo Zeiter $113,819 7 Jonathan Cohen $85,193 8 Darren Rabinowitz $64,513 9 Matias Ruzzi $49,420
Dana Castaneda Wins Event #54: $1,000 No-Limit Hold'em This tournament saw a field of 2,883 players battle it out for three days. At the end of it all, Dana Castaneda, of USA, was crowned the champion and received her first gold bracelet and $454,207 in prize money. Castaneda is the first women to win an open event at this year's World Series of Poker. But not only that, she's also the first female open event winner other than Vanessa Selbst since 2007!
Event #2: No-Limit Hold'em / Eight Handed (buy-in: $5,000) A total of 481 players entered this event and created a $2,260,700 prize pool. The final table was set after 3 days of play and Trevor Pope had half the chips in play. He eliminated six of seven competitors at the final table and was crowned the winner after roughly four hours of play.
The third Day of the EPT Sanremo main event is in the books. The day kicked off with 163 players and the player-field was narrowed down to 66 throughout the day. Day 2 chip leader Inge Forsmo, from Norway, will bring a stack of 1,021,000 chips to play today - about 160k more than his closest opponenets: Charly Maracchione, Angelo Recchia and Caremlo Vasta.
For those not familar with the names above, Shaun Deeb, Isaac Haxton, Justin Bonomo, David Vamplew (just to mention a few) are great, well-known players who made it through Day 3 and still have the chance of reaching the final table where a €800,000 first place prize is up for grabs.
Day 3 of EPT Campione main event saw a field of 99 players. The plan was to play down to 24 players in six levels and call it a day, but the tournament directors decided to to let the action continue a bit into level 7 and then stopped with 24 players. It was a very long day and most of the players probably went straight to bed for some well-needed sleep.
PokerStars European Poker Tour is in Campione, Italy at the moment. Day 1a, Day 1b and Day 2 have been completed over the past 3 days and now 99 of 570 players remain. In the lead is Balazs Botond with 646,000 chips, and in second place is Ronny Kasier, the 2011 EPT Tallinn winner, with 505,900.
The EPT Loutraki main event has now been played for 3 days, and in a few hours 100 players will return with hopes of becoming 1 of the 48 players who will receive a share from the $€1,344,000. Day 1a and 1b both ended with a German players in the lead. But once Day 2 came to an end, not a single German is among the top 10 players.
The chip leader is the Team PokerStars Pro Toni Judet from Romania with 288,200, and in second place is Grudi Grudev from Bulgaria with 251,600 chips. Apart from Toni Judet, there is only 1 Team PokerStars Pro with chips left, Ana Marquez. Marquez has 69,000 chips and is closely followed by David Vamplew with 67,600 chips.
After 4 days of poker, the final table of World Poker Tour Venice is set! In the lead is no one else than the 2010 EPT London winner, David Vamplew (picture). However, he's not the only EPT winner on the final table. Maxim Lykov, winner of 2009 EPT Kiev, has also made it to the final table with a big stack, however, he's almost 2 million chips behind David Vamplew who has accumulated 4.1 million chips. It will be a very interesting final table where everyone is guaranteed at least €31k each and the winner will get €380k.
David Vamplew has done it again. The night after his amazing EPT London Main Event win (won heads-up against poker legend John Juanda), he defeated 8 UKIPT winners from season one and he's now the champion of PokerStars UK & Ireland Poker Tour Champion of Champions Event. For the win he received an entry to the next season of UIKPT.
These are players he had to defeat to become the Champion of UIKPT Chmpions event. Padraig Parkinson (UKIPT Galway winner), Joeri Zandvliet (Manchester), Gilles Augustus (Coventry), Andy Couldridge (Nottingham), Femi Fakinle (Killarney), Jamie Burland (Brighton), Nick Risk (Edinburgh) and Max Silver (Dublin).
David Vamplew, 23, made it to the final table 3rd in chips, but he was almost half a stack behind Kyle Bowker and poker legend John Juanda. These 3 remained in the top of the field until they were the last men standing. Kyle Bowker was first out and then it was Juanda and Vamplew who played heads-up for the EPT title. The heads-up was quite even at first, Juanda with a slight advantage though. After sometime, 2 big pots ended up on Juanda's side of the table and suddenly he had a 4-1 chip advantage. At this point, everything pointed Juanda's way and he was very close of winning his first EPT title.
Vamplew, however, had no plans whatsoever to give up and now he switched gears and started playing fantastic poker. After an amazing comeback, and with a bit of help from the poker gods, Vamplew took home the tournament and the first place prize of £900,000.
