The Norwegian Championships is traditionally not held in Norway. Poker, despite being a game which many Scandinavians seem to have taken to like, well, fish to water, is not legal over there, and underground clubs and forays to Sweden are all the Norwegians really get in the way of the live game. A couple of years ago, Snoopy and I braved the trip to Grebbestad to see what happened when hundreds of Norway’s disparate onliners came together to play each other for the sheer glory of it, and found out that they generally had a lot of fun.
This year the Championships, including the £500 Main Event, sponsored by Expekt.com (a sell-out at 514 players) were held in Nottingham’s Dusk Till Dawn Club, the new, legal, poker-only venue which has been met with pretty universal praise for its standards. But would it cope with chartered-planes-full of Norwegians descending on it for a week? Would they be able to run their monthly £300 Deepstack, Omaha and £100 Rebuy events simultaneously, as well as set up a table for live broadcast over the net and TV-quality recording of a final table? The answer was yes.
The atmosphere over the five-day Main Event was excellent, and players like Johnny Lodden, Henning Granstad, Frode Fagerli, Dag Martin Mikkelsen and a host of other top Norwegians rubbed shoulders with the few UK players who’d managed to squeeze in, like Daves Colclough and Smith, Maria Demetriou, Lucy Rokach, Laurence Gosney and Ian Frazer. Of course, vastly outnumbered by the Norwegians, a few UK players managed to sneak up the leaderboard and into the money, including Daniel Platten, Billy Ngo and Chris Bruce.
The final table lineup was as follows:
Sondre Barlien-- 1036000
Stig Rune Kveen -- 777500
Erik Borkvik -- 613000
Marcus Pettersson -- 602500
Ian Frazer -- 526500
Svein Arnesen -- 436000
Oyvind Efraimsen -- 423500
Kjetil Skau -- 422000
Tage Almark – 308000
Despite starting off with the chip advantage, Sondre Barlien had to make do with 5th place, while it was Kjetil Skau and later Stig Rune Kveen who took control at different points, the latter ending up by the time it got short-handed with a commanding chip lead. Frazer finished 6th, but the top prize nearly went to (shock, horror) a non-Norwegian in the form of Marcus Pettersson, a sneaky Swede who’d got into the event despite strictly speaking not being meant to enter. Apparently this dates back to one of those long-standing love/hate feuds where Sweden barred Norwegians from entering the Swedish Championships, so Norway retaliated etc. But there were no hard feelings at the end as Kveen took the title, the trophy, the bonus WSOP Main Event seat and over £70k.
Final standings:
1st Stig Rune Kveen -- £70,362
2nd Marcus Pettersson -- £39,836
3rd Kjetil Skau -- £24,897
4th Oyvind Efraimsen -- £17,320
5th Sondre Barlien -- £14,072
6th Ian Frazer -- £9,742
7th Erik Borkvik -- £7,577
8th Tage Almark -- £5,412
9th Svein Arnesen -- £4,330
As cries of ‘Skol!’ echoed around the bar, the cash tables, and pretty much anywhere in the building which had been infiltrated by Norwegians, the consensus was that the event had been well-run, supported enthusiastically by all who participated, and will be likely to return again next year.