EPT Prague thread

[mondatoo]

Just caught up with this, unlucky Toby.

[TightEnd]

Day 3 is over
Level 20, 6,000-12,000 (1,000 ante)
Entries 584, 24 remain

Player   Country   Chip Count

Eyal Avitan   Israel      1900000
Juha Lauttamus   Finland      1311000
Jan Skampa   Czech Republic   1288000
Stefan Mattsson   Sweden      1000000
Gustav Ekerot   Sweden      928000
Anthony Roux   France      903000
Bastian Trachte   Germany   PokerStars player   893000
Jerome Zerbib   France      860000
Evgeniy Zaytsev   Russian      804000
Laurence Ryan   Ireland   PokerStars qualifier   740000
George Secara   Romania      733000
Manuel Bevand   France      719000
Priyan de Mel   UK      691000
Yann Brosolo   France      689000
Jolmer Meelis   Netherlands   654000
Luca Pagano   Italy   Team PokerStars Pro   648000
Antony Lellouche   France   625000
Kalle Matti Niemi   Finland      619000
Andreas Eiler   Germany      403000
Sven Eichelbaum   Germany      368000
Sebastien Boyard   France      258000
Andre Paiva   Brazil              252000
Paulo Gomes   France      241000
Boris Yanpolskiy   Russia      138000

[tikay]

Well done Hampshire Boy.

Big things are ahead for you if you can keep focused.

Delighted.

[TightEnd]

Final table

Day 4 is over
Level 25, 20,000-40,000 (4,000 ante)

Entries 584, 8 remain

Player   Country   Status   Chip Count

Jan Skampa   Czech Republic   3571000
Stefan Mattsson   Sweden      3429000
Anthony Roux   France      2854000
Eyal Avitan   Israel                      2550000
Luca Pagano   Italy   Team PokerStars Pro   2082000
Laurence Ryan   Ireland   PokerStars qualifier 1383000
Sven Eichelbaum   Germany      780000
Gustav Ekerot   Sweden      612000


Pagano is so consistent in these

[George2Loose]

Luca finalling AGAIN?!?!?!

[Cottonbud]

Impressive, UL to Priyan who bubbled the final

[810ofclubs]

Mattsson will win deffo, guy is a sick motherfucker so ill

[TightEnd]

EPT6 PRAGUE - FINAL TABLE PLAYER PROFILES


Seat 1: Anthony Roux, 26, from Provence, France - 2,839,000 chips
Roux was studying accountancy when he first tried online poker. He used to spend his evenings playing the video game Quake 3 when a friend suggested he try Texas Hold'em instead. He deposited a dollar and has never looked back. He is now a well-respected high stakes online cash game player at the $10/$20 and $20/$50 limits. He turned pro nearly three years ago. Although Roux has played numerous EPTs, making the EPT Prague final is actually his first EPT cash. He came fifth at the WSOP $2k NLHE event this summer for $120,311 and followed that up at the WSOPE in London a few months later with another fifth place finish in the £1k NLHE event for £28,181 but has never gone deep at an EPT. He currently share a house in London with EPT Live "Voice of France" presenter Benjamin Gallen who says Roux is "an exceptional player."


Seat 2: Stefan Mattsson, 30, Stockholm, Sweden - 3,553,000 chips
Although Swedish pro Stefan Mattsson is a familiar figure on the European Poker Tour circuit and has cashed several times, this is the first time he has had come even close to a final. He has played poker since he was a child and took up Texas Hold'em seven years ago. Although he considers himself primarily a cash game
player, Mattsson has notched up over $800k in major tournaments winnings. He first came to international attention when he went deep in the 2006 World Series, finishing 57th for $123,699. The following year he bettered that with a 22nd finish for $333,490. In May 2008 he was runner-up at WPT Barcelona in for €220,000 and this summer came sixth in the WSOP PLO World Championship for $118,462. Mattsson has cashed three times at EPTs but never for huge amounts - 41st at EPT4 Barcelona for €12,550, 35th in Prague last season for €9,700 and EPT Vilamoura two weeks ago where he came 37th for €8,121. Stefan now lives in Stockholm but grew up in Kiruna in Lappland, Sweden's northernmost city, some 145 km above the Arctic circle.

Seat 3: Larry Ryan, 46, Tipperary, Ireland, PokerStars qualifier - 1,338,000 chips
Larry Ryan won his seat to Prague in a $22 rebuy satellite on PokerStars and is the last remaining PokerStars qualifier in the tournament. The 46-year-old grandfather, who runs his own employment agency in Tipperary, only came to Prague in the first place so that he could gain some experience before the PCA. He has qualified for the PCA but was keen to get more practice at deep-stack tournaments first. EPT Prague is actually the first event he has ever played outside Ireland but he's a familiar figure on the Irish Poker Tour which he has won a seat to four years running. Ryan started playing draw poker as a teenager and took up NLHE six years ago. This is his best live result to date although he came ninth at the Irish Poker Championships in Galway last year for €10k. He has also won a seat to this year's Irish Poker Championships which takes place next weekend and is now the launch event for the new PokerStars.com UK and Ireland Poker Tour.

Seat 4: Gustav Ekerot, 22, Stockholm, Sweden - 502,000 chips
Gustav Ekerot comes from Stockholm and still lives with his parents. Ekerot first start playing poker with friends at school when he was 17. After watching the WPT on television, he started playing some free-rolls online and his success in these gave him the start of an online bankroll. He's a full time poker pro and makes his living by competing in online multi-table tournaments. He has also been successful in live events and came second in Master Classics of Poker in Amsterdam last year for €430,000. When not playing poker, Ekerot likes playing indoor hockey.


Seat 5: Sven Eichelbaum, 32, Dresden, Germany - 658.000 chips
Sven is a painter and runs his own company in Dresden. He's playing poker for three years, both online and live, but the EPT final table in Prague is by far his biggest success so far. Two years ago he finished third at the Baltic Poker Championship for €7.500. "It's just amazing to make the final table here in Prague. I had so many ups and downs", Sven said. But this is not the only reason that tomorrow will be a big day for Sven. His girlfriend Stefani has travelled specially to Prague to cheer him on at the final. "We'll be celebrating tomorrow whatever happens in the tournament as it's also Stefani's birthday."

Seat 6: Jan Skampa, 23, Prague, Czech Republic - 3,985,000 chips
Local hero Jan Skampa has made back-to-back final tables - a phenomenal feat which almost certainly hasn't been achieved since Season 1 when Ram Vaswani and Julian Thew both made the finals of Dublin and Copenhagen. Skampa, an economics student in Prague, came fourth two weeks ago in Vilamoura and now has a good chance of bettering that result in Prague. He is already by far the most successful Czech player on the EPT circuit and is third in the Czech all-time money list.

Skampa is currently studying at Charles's University in Prague, his home city, but spends most of his time playing poker. He learned the game from friends and has been playing seriously for just three years, scoring his first big result last August at WPT Slovakia, $24,508 for eighth place. He followed that with a win a month later, $24,881 at a WPT Cyprus side event before eclipsing all previous results with a fourth place finish in Vilamoura worth € 117,128.

Seat 7: Eyal Avitan, 34, Ashkelon, Israel - 2,627,000 chips
Avitan is almost certainly the only player at this season's final table who has already cashed in a side event. After finishing Day 1b on just 34,000, Avitan slipped across the room to enter a $300 turbo side event - and finished second for $13,500. Avitan took up poker six years ago on a Caribbean cruise and, although he only played three live tournaments so far, he has already had reasonable results. In June, he finished seventh in a WPT Barcelona side event for € 4,300 and he also came sixth in a $500 WPT Cyprus side event in September.
The Israeli realtor came to Prague with his friend Ran Azor who was runner-up at the WPT Championship in April for nearly $1.5 million. Azor has now gone home and Avitan's wife Karen is back in Israel caring for the couple's 11-month-old twins Noam and Shani. The lack of supporters on the rail has clearly had little negative effect on Avitan's game however and he described reaching the final as a "dream come true".

Seat 8: Luca Pagano, 31, Treviso, Italy - Team PokerStars Pro - 2,119,000 chips
Team PokerStars Pro Luca Pagano has broken his own records yet again here at EPT Prague by making his sixth EPT final table and his 13th EPT cash. The 31-year-old former computer programming student from Treviso, Italy, kicked off his poker career using play money on PokerStars but soon progressed to real money and turned a modest deposit into a monster online bankroll. He is also hugely successful in live events putting together a small fortune in winnings. He has played dozens of EPTs since the tour started in 2004 and is currently in second place on the EPT all-time Tournament Leader Board. Luca was nominated EPT Player of the Year in September 2007. As well as tournaments, he has also won huge amounts at the high stakes cash tables and has had several WSOP side event cashes. His best result to date was 6th place at the Season 4 EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo for € 337,000.

[gasman]

Impressive, UL to Priyan who bubbled the final

[NoflopsHomer]

Mattsson will win deffo, guy is a sick motherfucker so ill

Getting QQ and AA back to back vs AJ and JJ helps!

[GreekStein]

Mattsson will win deffo, guy is a sick motherfucker so ill

Getting QQ and AA back to back vs AJ and JJ helps!

wow yeah versus the monster that is Ace Jack. With those coolers he'll deffo win.

[NoflopsHomer]

Mattsson will win deffo, guy is a sick motherfucker so ill

Getting QQ and AA back to back vs AJ and JJ helps!

wow yeah versus the monster that is Ace Jack. With those coolers he'll deffo win.

With his image, button vs big blind, especially when it's vs Luca Pagano 4bet shoving probs near the bottom of his range.

[TightEnd]

From www.pokerstarsblog.com

In June this year, PokerStars launched the Czech and Slovak Poker Tour, a gentle four-event series costing about $750 a pop, with the intention of bringing affordable poker to a whole region of inexperienced players.

The thing is, a young student from Prague named Jan Skampa has clearly been putting the hours in already.

Two weeks ago in Portugal, Skampa, 23, became the first Czech player ever to make the final table of an EPT event. This week he is a champion. Skampa rode a wave of home support through one of the toughest EPT final tables ever gathered to claim the winner's trophy this evening - and a cheque for €682,000.

"Winning a large tournament like an EPT in my home town is one of the greatest achievements anyone can have," Skampa said. Although he's a student and lives within a couple of miles of this venue - the Hilton Hotel in the magnificent Czech capital - we're assuming he won't be taking the bus home. Either way, Pot Noodles and snakebite-blacks are on him!

Skampa, simply, is a brilliant player - that much is already clear. His natural game seems to be precisely the kind that startles, confounds and bludgeons opponents, forces them into mistakes while he remains almost impossibly focused. Like the Cruyff turn or the Federer backhand, the Skampa stare-down is a thing of natural beauty. Often eschewing the option even to look at the community cards, he instead glares with eyes like a statue's, laser beams reading minds and exploring souls in one glance.

"I used to stare at the table but now I stare at my opponents as I feel it helps me to pick up tells," Skampa said.

It's a measure of his opponents' mettle that it took them more than 10 hours to melt. By the time Skampa willed the last of Eyal Avitan's chips from the grasp of the obdurate Israeli player, the tournament clock had clicked into the 32nd level and it was beyond 10.30pm. The heads-up duel alone lasted three hours; Avitan too, on his first EPT appearance, earns much credit, alongside €454,000.

"Heads up was tough as it seemed we were both trying to avoid getting it in on a flip," Skampa said. "But after a while I felt he was getting more tired than me and by then I had figured out his play."

At the start, the final table evoked memories of the lightening swiftness of San Remo in season four. That match was over in less than four hours, and when the two short-stacks Sven Eichelbaum and Gustav Ekerot busted eighth and seventh within the first level here, we thought we might be seeing a repeat.

It also didn't take long to lose the next couple, and if the first two eliminations were to be expected, so, in the worse possible sense, was the third.

Luca Pagano is without a serious challenger at the top of the EPT tournament leaderboard. He has made six final tables from 13 deep runs at EPT events and seems to cruise into the latest stages without any problem at all. But the winner's trophy remains elusive to the Team PokerStars Pro and here in Prague he hit the crossbar again.

Clearly going for the all-out victory rather than just to edge up the payout ladder, Pagano raised from the button and then shoved over the top of Mattsson's big blind re-raise. One problem: he'd run into queens and his ace-jack could not catch up.

Despite another entry in the catalogue of near misses, Pagano remained philosophical. "If I look back at what I achieved here in Prague, the glass is not empty, it's actually quite full," Pagano said. "It's frustrating to keep trying but I know myself and I know that to miss the title again will give me even more energy and concentration for the next tournament. This quest for the trophy is giving me more strength."

Pagano's exit left five players, but Larry Ryan, the PokerStars qualifier from Ireland, was out so soon after that he ended up sitting beside the Italian at the cash desk. Ryan was only playing in Prague as a warm up to the PCA, for which he has also qualified online, but his poker education could probably have done without the first-hand experience of running jacks into aces pre-flop. Mattsson had poker's biggest hand to oust the Irishman, and he also had a huge advantage going into the four-handed scrap.

This is where the brakes went on. Anthony Roux, Skampa and Avitan all took small slivers out of Mattsson and the stacks evened out a good deal. When something gave, as it had to, it was the shortest of those four, Roux, who perished. His pocket tens were out-raced by Avitan's ace-king, all in pre-flop, and all of a sudden, this was turning into the kind of final where playing with fire, in the spirit of the always aggressive Skampa and Mattsson, was less effective than playing with monster hands.

Avitan, Skampa and Mattsson were all deep stacked when they went three-handed, and they merrily exchanged chips through level 28, then level 29 and even into level 30. Mattsson had suddenly become the man under most pressure, though, while Avitan had inched past 10 million.

Lo and behold it was those two who clashed to send this to the heads up stage. All in pre-flop, Avitan flopped a straight with [jd][10h] to outdraw Mattsson's [qd][10s]. Mattsson headed to the cage to collect more than a quarter of a million euros, leaving Skampa and Avitan to do battle for close to three times that.


The chips went this way and that, but eventually Skampa grabbed a stranglehold. His relentless raising, then glaring, then raising and then staring eventually forced a mistake from Avitan. Skampa was waiting with pocket jacks when Avitan moved all in with jack-nine. Only then did the Skampa visage crack. His smile, to raucous cheers, capped one of those performances. No one deserved it more.

Yet again, then, we crown a new EPT main event champion - and this time from a whole new country. Skampa was already the highest-ranked player from Czech Republic in the EPT database after his final table in Vilamoura. Now he's simply one of the most monied from the continent - and on what we've seen here, this will not the last of his wins.

Review the final table with the level-by-level coverage, which pretty much equates to a hand-by-hand account of Skampa's triumph.

Very similar, only with added Eichelbaum, at the German blog. And there's a definite Ekerot/Mattsson bias over there with those crazy Swedes. Meanwhile they might as well rename the Italian blog Luca Pagano.com. But you can never get enough Luca.

Our next stop on PokerStars Blog is Galway, Ireland, next week. Then the EPT rolls into the Bahamas for the PCA. I'm guessing we'll see Jan Skampa there. How about you?

[TightEnd]

Jan Skampa