blonde poker

 
In the early hours of Monday morning and after a mammoth 13-hour session, Praz Bansi proved what a fine asset he is to British poker by finally defeating Simon ‘The Bubble’ Zach, thereby becoming the Broadway Festival of Poker Champion.

With 36 players heading into Day 2 and the blinds still relatively small compared to the average stack, a long night was expected, and that’s just what we got after eight hours of play could only lose 20 players, the final table remaining nothing more than a distant hope.

And with the bubble taking almost 2 hours to burst (the unfortunate spot falling to local boy Shanthe Somaratne), it wasn’t until very late in the day that we stumbled upon our last ten, a final table which was comprised of the following:

David Lloyd
Chris Gavriel
Trevor Reardon
P Pihlajamaa
George Geary
Mohammed Shaffiq
Simon Zach
Henning Bolstad
Praz Bansi
S Javadi

As Henning Granstad commented, “This is a wonderful structure, there have been very few bad beats because people haven’t been forced to shovel it all in,” and this may have constituted to a lengthy session of 10-handed play, in which it took an age to lose our first player, that place going to Chris Gavriel, his K-Q no match for Bolstad's Big Slick.

However, after we lost the only female on the table, S Javadi, in 9th, the tide suddenly turned and, as if eliminations were like buses, we promptly encountered an inexplicable flurry of exits at a time when the word ‘deal’ was being flung around and the possibility of a 5.30 chip count was at the forefront of everyone’s mind. But, in the space of 30 minutes, we somehow managed to lose 8th (Pihlajamaa) to 3rd (Shaffiq - right) places in what was looking like becoming the Simon Zach show as he took out 4 of those men.

But, as we have learned in recent times, you can never count someone like Praz Bansi out, and with him taking out Shaf with 7-7 vs. Q-J (empathic 7 hit the Flop), we were approximately level-pegging with Bansi, and his experience as a WSOP bracelet winner and inaugural GukPT victor, emerging as the clear favourite.

But Simon wasn’t about to lay down, winning his fair share of hands before the inevitable ‘big’ pot cropped up, Simon’s flopped set (9-6 on a 5-7-8 Flop) being outdrawn by Praz’s flush draw, the 2 of spades dealing Simon a crushing blow that he would ultimately fail to recover from.

An A-3 (Praz) vs. K-5 (Simon) later and it was all over, an Ace on the Flop virtually sealing victory for the Londoner. Both players shook hands (although I do remember the odd needling heads-up) and posed proudly for the subsequent photos.

But whilst the name ‘Praz Bansi’ will be on everyone’s lips for the upcoming weeks, the most controversial aspect of the weekend was the prize structure, a rather unusual 20k gap between 1st and 2nd prize. But having said that, no deals were made and the clock and blind structure of the comp enabled the cream to rise to the top, which with Praz Bansi, is undoubtedly what occurred.