Ladies and gentlemen, we are just hours away from EPT Barcelona - one of the biggest and more prestige full stops on the tour. Just like last year, we can expect a huge field of players to take part in the Main Event with a buy-in of €5000+€300. Defending champion Carter Phillips, EPT Snowfest winner Allan Baekke and EPT Vilamoura winner Antonio Matias are 3 of the most interesting names that already have announced that they will take part in the Main Event.
PokerStars has been running lots of satellites for EPT Barcelona. Now over 160 online qualifiers players are on their way to Barcelona to take part in the Main Event. Some of them have won their entry for as little as €7.50 - now they have the chance of winning some serious cash that can take their poker career in the right direction.
Last weekend, PokerStars (in the connection with the last EPT tournament of the season) dealt out the EPT awards for this year. William Thorson, the swedish PokerStars Pro, received the award for best Omaha player. William has been very successful in different PL Omaha events at EPT London and Bahamas.
Maxim Lykov received the EPT Player of the Year award. Lykov won EPT Kiev in the beginning of the season, then he won a side-event at PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in January. He also finished in 13th place in EPT Snowfest + a few other good results in other side-events.
Allan Bække dominated the last few days of the EPT snowiest main event. He reached the final table as big chip leader and continued playing his very best poker. Everything was going his way and there was no doubt that he would make it far. Anyhow, when the table was down to 3 players, Allan Bække, Russell Carson and Johannes Strassmann (German PokerStars Pro), his poker skills were really put to the test.
It seemed like it would take forever before any player got knocked out. Well, it took 3 hours of play before Johannes Strassmann was sent packing and left Bække and Russell Carson to play heads-up poker. Even though Bække had dominated throughout the tournament and at the final table, Russell had no plans what so ever to give him an easy win. It was a quite even game at first, but then Bække switched to his second gear and finally managed to win the heads-up after nearly 2 hours. For the win he received nothing less than €445,000.
It took about seven hours of play for 24 players to become 8 in Day 4 of the EPT Snowfest Main Event. PokerStars Pro Richard Toth was one of the first players who were sent packing. However, his teammate Johannes Strassmann made it to the final table with a 2,034,000 stack (4th place).
Allan Baekke (picture), the chip leader as Day 4 started, continued playing good, if not even better, in day 4 of the tournament. He now has a stack of 4,868,000 chips and is the big favorite to take home the tournament.
The third day of the EPT Snowfest Main Event is now in the books. Alfio Battisti went out on the bubble when he went all in before the flop with A[d]A[h] and got called by Evegeniy Zaytsev's 3[d]3[s]. The board ran out J[s]A[s]2[s] 10[s] 5[s]. He's probably still thinking "Why me, ohh poker gods, why me?!". After that everyone was guaranteed at least €5k+ the action really started and at the end of a long, intensive day of poker 24 players still had chips left.
203 out of 296 players who entered the tournament made it through to Day 2 of EPT Kyiv. The one that brought the most chips (153,825 chips) with him from Day 1 was Viktor Ivanov from Russia. At the moment Day 2 is at level 9 and 142 players are now left in the tournament. The current chip leader is Jeffrey Sarwer from Canada with 260,000 chips. On second and third place we find Dragan Galic (210,000) and Viktor Ivanow (153,00). Many PokerStars qualifiers are doing very well so far in the tournament.
Top 5 PokerStars qualifiers at the moment:
5th place - Allan Baekke, Denmark (150,000 chips) 6th place - Andrew Malott, USA (150,000 chips) 9th palce - Alexander Fritzgerald, USA (127,00 chips) 11th place - Shaun Deeb, USA (114,000 chips) 24th place - Darren Mould, UK (60,000 chips)
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