Kabrhel's "Silly" Play Lands Him the Day 1a Chip Lead at the EPT Grand Final
The prodigal son has come back to his rightful home. That’s how it feels for all of us involved on the EPT. Madrid was great as a venue for last season’s Grand Final but the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo®Casino European Poker Tour is back in the grandest of homes, and we don’t want to move out again.
There are certain tournaments on the global poker calendar that can’t be missed and this is one of them. Everybody who is everybody will be here over the course of the week. Day 1b tomorrow will be big in terms of numbers, but today’s 271-strong field was big in talent.
Out of the 165 players who made it through Martin Kabrhel showed the most talent today, along with a little luck, to bag up 167,800 chips. He got off to a great start when he busted a player whilst holding nine-deuce. The flop had a low board containing two little ducks and his opponent couldn't release his pocket tens. From there he reached the dizzy heights of 200k after playing "silly" as he described it, before he dropped back to where he sits until day 2.
Kabrhel played the latter stages of the day along side Freddy Deeb and John Eames, who were also two of the bigger stacks. They finished on 114,600 and 157,200 respectively. Just one table along from them sat David "Doc" Sands who treated himself to a long massage that helped him to finish on 163,300.
Other notables who made it through included the last winner here Nicolas Chouity (38,700), Phil Ivey (72,000), Ondrej Vinklarek (83,200) and Steve O'Dwyer (101,600).
The full force of Team PokerStars Pro will be on show tomorrow but 14 were in attendance today. Mickey Petersen from Team Online performed the best with 98,800. Those who failed to make it through included Arnaud Mattern and Jan Heitman.
We'll post the full end of day chip counts here when we get them through shortly. Day 1b kicks off at 12pm (CET) tomorrow and it's going to be big, very big. Join the PokerNews team back here then as we slowly work towards another great champion.