The first new stop on the EPT tour was Dortmund in Germany, where a sellout 500 strong crowd was promised along with a pleasant Baden-esque all-inclusive Casino experience. The Casino Hohensyburg was actually, we discovered upon landing at Dortmund airport, located in a wood about halfway between Dortmund and Hagen (where we were situated hotel-wise). This necessitated a series of increasingly-bizarre taxi rides between the two locations, starting with a few relatively normal trips and ending up with a geriatric myopic driver who couldn’t really work his satnav and stared in concentration at it while driving at 60mph down the wrong side of the road, simultaneously flicking through his CD of Turkish house music at top volume while periodically offering us one of many candies he kept between the front seats. To say Chris ‘NoflopsHomer’ was tense at the end of this ride would be an understatement.
The later the trip, the weirder the taxi experience, so it was for the best that the tournament days
started at 3pm. The Day 1A and Day1B split was weighted towards the latter for ‘name’ players, as seems to be becoming standard on the tour. This doesn’t mean that less report-worthy action occurred on the first day, but one wonders if players now breathe a sigh of relief if they get the day with the higher proportion of online qualifiers (not in any way to disparage the ability of random internet qualifiers – some of my best friend are online qualifiers). We spotted in the first flight Pab, Joe Beevers, Steve Vladar and Bad Girl, as well as APAT qualifier Lee Mulligan, Mike Tse, Ian 'hotdog' Fieldhouse and Mats Iremark, Multitasker of the Day with his eternally rotating Rubix Cube.
Knocked back early but proving resilient was JP Kelly (we heard from Jon Raab something about Queens running into a set of Fours) who played an unusual grinding game which saw him crawl back to his starting stack at the first break, shooting up to nearly twice that when he turned quads with a happily betting opponent, before exiting just before close of play. Elsewhere the UK’s Jim Kerrigan was proving he was not such a rock, Julian Thew was playing musical chairs, Karl Mahrenholz was building a stack by “playing Deuces like Aces,” but the front runners early doors were US player Edmund Carter and Andreas Hagen, with Johnny Lodden increasing in chips while everyone else decreased in energy during the 10 hour playing day. He ended the day chip leader topping 100k, with Brian Hansen and Henning Granstad just behind him.
Meanwhile, we found refreshingly enthusiastic Spanish player Pablo Rua with over 50k about halfway through the day, which was fun for us as we’d been unceremoniously bundled into a cab with him and his girlfriend upon arrival at the airport, much to our collective surprise. It appears that one set of customers per cab just doesn’t satisfy the drivers of Dortmund. We also found German superstars of poker Jan Heitmann and George Danzer. I can call them by this title officially now, as they were, on Day 1A, taking part in a televised sit’n’go called the German Superstars of Poker. It was won by, er, Marcel Luske, but that doesn’t matter – our friends who first appeared at the Vic and went on to show up in Baden accompanied by their own documentary crew are now, it appears, the German equivalent of Julian Thew crossed with Jesse May – good ambassadors for the game ever growing in popularity in Germany, as everywhere else, and guest commentators for the live streaming of the latter stages.
The second start day had so many other well-recognised names we were hard-pressed to navigate the tightly-packed tables to snap them all before the much faster played game knocked them out. Players like Marc Goodwin and Ben Grundy who’d come straight from Goa (and when I say straight, I mean with a day’s worth of delay thrown in) looked tanned but tired, and that probably made the long day that little bit too long to keep concentration, for the former, at least. Ben, meanwhile, went on to finish 16th. Dusk Til Dawn players Michael Greco and Carlo Citrone found themselves drawn on the same table, and although Michael made it to Day Two short stacked, it wasn’t really the UK’s finest hour, despite making up 13% of the field. Womble played under the watchful (in fact, faintly stalkerish) eye of Jon Raab, who made an entire thread out of his 'Womblecam' watching him successfully fold many hands, while progressing upwardly in chips for most of his start day. A hand by hand update is available on the blonde forum, for his hardcore fans.
A special bubble time mention has to be made of eventual sneaker into the mone
y Paul ‘Pab’ Foltyn, whose short stack was in peril for over three hours, during which a whole level was totally wasted playing a dragging hand-for-hand game. He came back short on Day Two, pushed in several times in good spots, uncalled, then patiently waited for more such spots as they got through the lengthy bubble. At the end of it, a good 25% of the field found themselves in the same or worse shape than Pab had been at the beginning of the day, and there was carnage as the field shrank to the final table. A press of the ‘pause’ button would have left the disgruntled 27 money finishers in better shape to actually play after the bubble burst, but for some reason that was decided against. As it was, the blinds reached a pinnacle never before seen on the EPT, and were, of course, rolled back substantially for the final table.
There was a pretty strong lineup on the final two tables to get through first, and among those who didn’t quite make it were Johnny Lodden, Philip Yeh (who played with a relaxed fearlessness tipping him as one to watch in the future) and Germans Michael Muecklisch and Christoph Stiehler. The player who wins Climber of the Year in my opinion, however, was popular Frenchman Thomas Fougeron. At his lowest point he had 600 chips (which equalled two big blinds) and thanks to a combination of cards and luck at the desperate stages, he’d built his stack up to over 200k on Day Two, a point at which he could add playing well to the list.
As for the final, an innovation which should have been possible well before now has been introduced: live online streaming from the Feature Table. A brief tremor of anxiety ran through the press room – are bloggers now antiquated reporting mechanisms, when people can see every hand as it plays out live in moving pictures rather than still? Well, the answer turns out to be “not yet,” for a couple of reasons – the fact that broadband internet is not yet as ubiquitous as satnav in taxis in Dortmund, and the fact that some people like to talk back to their commentators. Fully prepared to walk the walk of superfluity, Chris and I were delighted that people still seemed to want to listen to us talk about the final. So here it is:
Seat 1: Andreas Hoivold (Norway)-- 750,000
Seat 2: Erick Lindberg (Sweden)-- 617,000
Seat 3: Nicolas Levi (France)-- 467,000
Seat 4: Jacob Rasmussen (Denmark)-- 265,000
Seat 5: Sebastian Ruthenberg (Germany)-- 717,000
Seat 6: Cristiano Blanco (Italy)-- 1,258,000
Seat 7: Thomas Fourgeron (France)-- 286,000
Seat 8: Gunnar Rabe (Sweden)-- 668,000
It’s been a good year so far for French players, and young Nicolas Levi, an onliner but clearly comfortable in the tournament environment, may well show up at a few more international events in the months to come. He had a bit of a rough start on the final, with aggressive, stacked-up Italian Cristiano Blanco re-raising him off a couple of hands, but it was Thomas Fougeron who exited just before him – Gunnar Rabe was responsible for fairly quickly crushing the French hopes for victory, eliminating both players. We had some mixed reports about Rabe from players who’d come across him earlier in the tournament, but his play on the final seems to verify that he certainly isn’t afraid to call.
After the dinner break, it looked like someone may have spiked Andreas Hoivold’s drink with something, as he suddenly started chatting it up non-stop. In fact, it was all Lee Jones could do to carry on commentating rather than a conversation with the extrovert Norwegian. He wasn’t looking like a chip leader contender at this point, though – it was Cristiano Blanco who took out Erik Lindberg in 6th place, calling with Sixes and racing out short-stacked Erik’s KJ, but suddenly, after picking up Kings and knocking out Jacob Rasmussen with them, he looked like he could be the one to challenge the Italian.
Gunnar Rabe, on the other hand, found a call with his Kings against Cristiano even though he had to call a flop check-raise and a bet on the Ace turn in one pot. So betting in the press room was divided – whether to support the steady Gunnar or the maverick Andreas. Sebastian Ruthenberg was short by the next break, and he made a good shot at doubling up (picking up several large sets of blinds in the process) and in fact eventually doing so with Jacks against Andreas Hoivold’s KQ. Suddenly there was another contender for chip leader, after he won a huge pot against Gunnar Rabe, and in fact Rabe was the next to fall in 4th.
There was a brief lull in actual cards to report, if not in pre-flop re-raising, until Sebastian pitted his nut flush draw (one card to come) against Andreas Hoivold’s KK in a monster pot which knocked him down to the point where he was autoall-in with Deuces, and eliminated in 3rd. Literally seconds later, and chip leader Andreas called Cristiano Blanco all in with Queens (I am sure he did get dealt other sorts of hands) which made short work of 9-Toff, crowning Andreas EPT German Open Champion. Compared to other, more phlegmatic winners, it must have been enjoyable to interview the frankly odd but very likeable Norwegian player, who ended the heads up in the shortest time I’ve ever witnessed on the tour.
The ending was abrupt, and so was our post-tournament hanging out, as a plane-train combo awaited us to Poland for the back-to-back Warsaw EPT. A gruelling further four days for Homer, and a much less gruelling three-and-a-half days of sitting around, strolling in parks and the like for me. But that’s another story.