Erik Tamm opened the pot with a raise from middle position, and he found action only from Luca Pagano who came along from the big blind.
The flop came down , and Pagano check-called a bet of 12,000. On the turn, the drew another check from the Team PokerStars Pro, and Tamm fired another 26,000 chips at the pot. Pagano thought it over for a bit longer this time, but he once again made the flat call.
The last card off was the , and there would be no check from Pagano this time. He slid out 37,000 of his chips, committing just about half his remaining stack. That play sent Tamm into the think tank, and he looked a bit confused at Pagano's line.
"How much you have behind?" he asked.
Pagano moved his hands to reveal his ~40,000 remainder.
"Call," said Tamm rather quickly thereafter. Pagano sheepishly flipped up his airball , and Tamm's was easily good enough to take down the pot.
Luca was left with just those ten big blinds, and we've just heard that he no longer has those either. Mr. Pagano has since been eliminated.
Michael Piper, whose moustache we at PokerNews really do like very much, is up to 410,000 after getting his chips in with pocket nines on a flop and finding himself up against pocket kings. The set of nines held, and it looks like we'll be seeing that moustache for a while yet.
Imre Leibold got his last in with against Mauro Stivoli's . We only caught the tail end of it so we're not sure when the chips went in, but we're guessing it was before the flop or it.
Peter Hedlund clearly plays much better when he's drinking - he's up to 290,000 and is in a super-happy mood now. He was singing last we checked on him.
Going Down
Canadian-born chess prodigy Jeff Sarwer will be going home to Poland (or more likely on to Monte Carlo) without another EPT cash - he is busto.
With around 100,000 in the pot by the time we arrived on the river of the board, Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier bet 44,400. Across the table, Luca Ascani checked his hole cards and dwelled up. He counted out the call and put it to one side, then mentally assessed the size of ElkY's remaining stack (105,000) and then dwelled up some more.
"Either you are bluffing or you are lucky," he told ElkY. Actually that seems to sum up an awful lot of situations in poker as a whole. But we digress. Ascani continued to tank, and eventually got involved in some kind of discussion with Michel Abecassis that resulted in the floor being called (presumably Abecassis called time at some point during the discussion) but before the floorman had got there, Ascani had called.
ElkY turned over . "Ahhhh!" said Ascani as though suddenly everything made sense. He mucked.
With that, ElkY is back in serious contention with 295,000.
Alexander Roumeliotis raised only for Jeroen Brokkar to shove from the button and Peter Krikkay to reshove from the small blind. Big blind Humberto Brenes got out of their way and, eventually, so did Roumeliotis. On their backs.
Brokkar:
Krikkay:
Brokkar doubled to a very respectable 175,000, while Krikkay dropped to 60,000 - just 20 big blinds.