Although a €1,105,000 first-place prize was up for grabs on the EPT Grand Final High Roller final table last Friday, it only took approximately 5 hours of play before a winner was crowned. The main reason for this fast-paced final table was that heads-up play only lasted for 1 hand!
Philipp Gruissem has done it again! The German poker pro bested an extremely tough field of 23 players (28 entries) over the weekend to take down the $100,000 buy-in World Poker Tour Apha8 St. Kitts (played at Royal Beach Casino) for an incredible $1,086,400! Believe it or not but Gruissem has won two of three Alpha8 high roller events (In October he won WPT Ahpha8 London for $1,379,840) since the series world premiere in August this year!
Final table results: 1 Philipp Gruissem $1,086,400 2 Tom McDonald $679,000 3 Mike McDonald $434,560 4 Jason Koon $298,760 5 Scott Seiver $217,280 6 Timothy Adams $0 7 Isaac Haxton $0 8 Fabian Quoss $0
The next WPT Apha8 (Johannesburg, South Africa) is scheduled for February 2014. Let's hope that Gruissem will participate then as well in order to defend the title!
The second and final day of WPT Alpha8 (£100,000 buy-in) saw 11 players returning to their seats, and the number of participants increased to 12 after the late arrival of American businessman Bill Perkins who flew in from the U.S. to United Kingdom mainly for this event.
Event #8: €25,600 High Roller No-Limit Hold'em (the final gold bracelet event at the 2013 WSOPE in Paris) saw 80 entries and only 13 players remain after two days of play. Philipp Gruissem was the only one to bag up more than a million chips at the end of Day 2. The German poker pro won a 700,000 pot with AA during Level 17 against Jason Mercier's AQ on the board Q10366. Gruissem will bring 1.269 million chips to Day 3.
Lots of well known poker players are in Monaco at the moment for the 2013 EPT Montle Carlo Grand Final, which begins in a few hours. However, what everyone's talking about is a €1,000,000 buy-in cash game! Rumors about the massive cash game have circulated on the web in the past 1-2 weeks or so and several people have already said they would play if the game goes (Sam Trickett, Isaac Haxton, Philipp Gruissem, Paul Newey and Niklas Heinecker). Apparenlty the game would be eight-handed, with €1,000/€2,000 blinds and optional straddle. The game would be played on May 11 (Saturday) at 16:00 local time.
"It's not often you get an opportunity to play in a game this big, so obviously that's pretty exciting," Isaac Haxton (picture) told PokerStars last week.
On Saturday, the 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (10th Anniversary) kicked off at Atlantis in The Bahamas. First out was the the $100,000 Super High Roller which saw a field of 47 players (Phil Ivey, Antonio Esfandiari, Daniel Negreanu etc) who accounted for 57 entries (10 re-buys).
44 survivors returned for the second day of the 2012 PokerStars EPT Sanremo €10,000 High Roller yesterday. When the day started, Brandon Barnes was the chip leader, and other notables remaining were Team PokerStars Pro Luca Pagano, Jonathan Duhamel and Eugene Katchalov. Unfortunately neither of them made it to the money, and Barnes was eliminated in 9th place for €20,600.
In case you didn't read our WPT Grand Prix de Paris updates last week, Philipp Gruissem finished both Day 2 and Day 3 with the largest pile of chips, and he had about 3 times the average stack and $100k more than his closest opponent Matthew Salsberg when Day 4 kicked off with 24 remaining players.
When 63 players sat down at the tables and Day 3 kicked off, the tournament director had a plan to get as close to 12 players as possible. But in the end there were still 24 remaining players, and the man with the biggest pile of poker chips was the same as when the day started, Philipp Gruissem.
As Benny Spindler secured his win in the ETP Main Event, his fellow countryman Philipp Gruissem took the first prize in the EPT High Roller Event, giving him a neat payout of £450,200. The final battle was decided on Kurganov's Qd-6s and Gruissem's 9c-9h.
1. Philipp Gruissem, Germany £450,200 2. Igor Kurganov, Russia £318,300 3. Rob Akery, UK £205,500 4. Olivier Busquet, USA £171,200 5. Adrian Bussman, Sweden £102,250 6. Joel Nordkvist, Sweden £72,950 7. Sam Trickett, UK £68,800 8. Michael Tureniec, Sweden £58,400
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Although a €1,105,000 first-place prize was up for grabs on the EPT Grand Final High Roller final table last Friday, it only took approximately 5 hours of play before a winner was crowned. The main reason for this fast-paced final table was that heads-up play only lasted for 1 hand!
