The third season of the highly successful European Poker Tour culminates this coming week with the Grand Final from Monte Carlo, with the prizepool already guaranteed to be the biggest in the EPT's short history and the winner will become a euro-aire scooping, at least, an estimated €1,500,000 for first prize. At the moment, there are nearly 600 players registered for this event, arguably one of the biggest outside the WSOP main event, which is double that of last year, when Pokerstars qualifier Jeff Williams beat Ash Hussain heads-up to take home the €900,000 first prize. This year, with the vastly increased prize pool and players, the EPT has been forced to add an extra day to the event meaning that it'll now last from the 28th of March until the 2nd of April.The vast field will include the whole Dusk Till Dawn crew continuing their blitz on the world, whilst the formidable Team Pokerstars, complete with it's world champion trio of Moneymaker, Hachem and Greg Raymer, will also compete.
Indeed, the latter of these has been in the news for other reasons in the last week or so. His account was apparently hacked by another Pokerstars player called 'ikeyrson' who stupidly decided that the b
est way to steal Raymer's money would be to play him Heads-Up, and use Raymer's account to make huge raises preflop, only to instantly fold when ikeyrson moved all-in. This only lasted for a couple of hours before Stars security were alerted to this obviously strange occurrence, as well as a large number of emails sent to support, and froze the accounts. All lost money has since been transferred back and the hacker permanently banned.But back to the Grand Final, the most interesting confrontation I'm looking forward to is not really the clash of big name players (though that will be great to watch), but the general battles that will occur between the Scandinavian players and the Americans. The combination of hyper-aggressive players against er... hyper-aggressive players should making for a fitting spectacle that the EPT Monte Carlo will no doubt be. To compete against this huge list of runners, Jen, Snoopy and I will all be there covering the event to get you the maximum amount of details from all the players over the allotted week. Join us from 2pm (1pm GMT) on Wednesday 28th March, as we bring you the conclusion of this year's EPT.