The Luck of the Draw
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Most of the tables have started five- or six-handed as the empty seats continue to fill in. Even with the sparse crowd, though, a number of interesting table pairings and trios have already appeared.
We start with Table 5 along the far side of the room, and there we find Walid Bou Habib in the five seat and Mickey Petersen in the seven. Petersen is the tour's most recent champion, besting the 299-player field at EPT Copenhagen to win his first live title. He's looking for an unprecedented double-dip here in this encore event.
Across the aisle is Table 11, and it contains Joep van den Bijgaart (Seat 2) and Tristan Clemencon (7). At Table 17 are Theo Jorgensen and Andrey Pateychuk sitting next to each other in the two and three seats, respectively. Jorgensen is a Team PokerStars Pro from Denmark, and Pateychuk wins (or nearly wins) practically everything he plays. In 2011, he finished 15th in the WSOP Main Event, won EPT San Remo, and won WPT Prague. Yikes.
And a pair of trios, too. We find a very tough table over by the windows, Table number 14. The hot-running Steve O'Dwyer is in Seat 1 there, and he's joined by Fatima Moreira de Melo (3) and Todd Terry (6). And near the exit door is what looks to be the toughest table in the room, Table 15. EPT6 Grand Final champion Nicolas Chouity is in Seat 3 there, joined by two familiar members of the high-stakes community. Eli Elezra and David Benyamine have both made the trip over to Madrid, and they're sitting there in Seats 5 and 7, respectively.