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£5,000 EPT London Main Event
Day 1a Completed
2009 PokerStars.com EPT London
£5,000 EPT London Main Event
Day: 1a
Event Info
2009 PokerStars.com EPT London
Final Results
Event Info
Level Info
Buy-in
£5,000
Prize Pool
£3,540,500
Total Entries
730
Level
31
Blinds
80,000 / 160,000
Ante
20,000
Players Left 1 / 730
Filter
A couple of players wandered off at this point - possibly wanting to be first in line to be overcharged for drinks at the Hilton bar - but the majority knuckled down to not being eliminated at the 11th hour.
There's no runaway monster stack leading the pack as far as we can see, so it looks like Moritz Schmejkal with 200k is still up on top or near top of a field which has more than halved itself over the course of nine one-hour levels today. It seems that any stack is get-in-able regardless of structure, and the play today was aggressive and inventive right from the start.
Tomorrow it all starts again at noon local time, when another 300+ (my guess at least 450, if they can fit) players will descend upon the Hilton Metropole's huge ballroom to play Day 1b of the London EPT. 27 more are getting in through the satellite running this very minute, and a whole host of big names who took today off as a buffer between this one and the WSOPE will be taking their seats tomorrow afternoon.
Join us 12pm for continued live coverage on Pokernews!
Teddy Sheringham talks poker to Gloria.
Decently sized-stacks include former EPT champions Arnaud Mattern and Roland De Wolfe, both have over 100,000 and are in the upper echleons of chip-based thievery.
Anyway, I saw a long dwell going on on the river of a
board. Exited-Skull-Tshirt-Guy had bet a little over 10k and Eastgate had plonked in enough yellow 5k chips to cover his opponent. Some torture was clearly being visited on him - he had about 30k left and the pot was now 43k, and he looked at his six chips and Eastgate's little tower of them for quite some time.A genuine decision - the rest of the table sat patiently for a couple of minutes as an expressionless Eastgate waited for a decision to be made.
Finally he called, but mucked when seeing Eastgate's monstrous
house. Oddly, he then stayed by the table for a while amiably talking about the hand with his eliminator - I think someone said the two of them are friends - before finally heading railwards.
Mattern check-raised a 4,800 bet to 12,000 on a
board before both checked the 
turn. On the river, Mattern bet 24,000 and Yuen called but mucked when he saw the Frenchman's , the latter having planned to check-raise the turn also.Sida Yuen's last chips went in holding
on a 
board against , the rollercoaster ride brought to an abrupt end.
If you've made the second half of the last level with over 150k, you're in the top 5, I'd reckon, while the short stacks aren't all that short if they've got over what they started with. Good old slow structure.
Counts as Day 1a draws near a close:
Mark Teltscher - 28,000
Sida Yuen - 66,300
Arnaud Mattern - 80,000
Michael Greco - 52,000
Nick Gibson - 19,000
Luke Patten - 100,000
Alex Kravchenko - 44,000
Chris Ferguson - 40,300
Vivek Rajkumar - 145,000
Florian Langmann - 32,500
Lex Maessen - 75,000
Maridu Mayrinck - 95,000
Ms. Mayrinck, incidentally, seems to have a very good attitude towards the swings and roundabouts of poker tournaments. I heard her say to some people on the rail, "I went from 130 to like 98k but I'm not complaining - life is good!"
Level: 9
Blinds: 500/1,000
Ante: 100
The flop was
where Matternc called Yuen's continuation bet. On the 
turn, Mattern called a 5,800 bet which allowed them to see the river.Here, in Arnaud's own words, he 'snap-called' the 11,800 river bet and Yuen could only show
.
