For the past several days, our coverage has been devoted exclusively to the record-breaking European Poker Tour Prague, which attracted an astounding 1,007 players. They’re down to 61 players in that tournament – which you can follow here – but today we’ll supplement that coverage with the start of the prestigious $10,000 High Roller.
Last year this event attracted 113 entries (five reentries) and created a prize pool of €1,107,400. It was such a success that an extra day had to be added to the schedule, and what a final day it turned out to be as Marvin Rettenmaier emerged victorious to capture the €365,300 first-place prize. What’s more, he captured some Player of the Year honors in the process.
“I did do all the calculations, believe me. I’m really weird about that stuff. I needed second place,” Rettenmaier said last year, where he actually missed the EPT Prague Main Event and a €2,000 Turbo event. That meant his last chance to capture POY points was in the €10,000 High Roller, and obviously he delivered.
Today we expect a field full of notables including Joe Kuether, Darren Elias, Dominik Nitsche, Paul Volpe, and Thomas Muhlocker, who won the high roller in Barcelona and currently sits atop the EPT10 Player of the Year leaderboard.
In addition, we expect to see Eugene Katchalov, Jonathan Duhamel, Marc-Andre Ladouceur, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, and a plethora of other Team PokerStars Pros. Unfortunately one player we won’t see is Player of the Year Daniel Negreanu, who opted to leave Prague after busting the Main Event.
That's a wrap for my 2013 poker wise. Will shoot a video with tallies and end of year thoughts when I get back to Vegas.Skipping high rollerFollow @RealKidPoker
Action is set to kick off at 1:00 p.m. local time, which is just a few hours from now. Be sure to join us then as we bring you all the action and eliminations from the last High Roller event of 2013!
Until then, check out Rettenmaier’s post-victory interview from last year: