Padraig Parkinson Among Six Irish Players Trying to Keep Trophy Home as 14 Return for Final Day of Irish Open Main Event
All good things must come to an end, and the 2024 €1,150 Irish Open Main Event, sponsored by PokerStars and Paddy Power Poker will not be able to escape that fate.
The largest-ever Irish Open Main Event field saw 3,233 entries battle it out through the course of four starting flights and two more full days of poker, but only 14 will return to the Royal Dublin Society at noon local time today to decide who will be crowned champion and take home the trophy, alongside the hefty €415,615 first-place prize.
Not only money and fame are on the line, but pride is as well. Being the oldest still running poker festival in Europe, the Irish Open is a prestigious event, and the home crowd would love nothing more than to keep the trophy on the island. Luckily for them, nearly half the remaining players have an Irish flag to their name, with the most notable of them being Padraig Parkinson, who is eighth on Ireland's all-time money list.
Parkinson has been playing poker since before some contestants were even born, with his first recorded live cash stemming from 1994. Parkinson's biggest-ever cash was a third-place finish at the WSOP Main Event in 1999, the year that his fellow countryman Noel Furlong took home the title of World Champion, but has kept booking poker results consistently for three decades.
Parkinson will start the day with 4,800,000 chips, which equates to 19 big blinds at the start of play and puts him in tenth place. The Irishman with the most chips is Ninh Van Hiep, who sits in third place with 9,700,000 chips. Van Hiep appears to play almost exclusively in Dublin and has already secured his biggest-ever live cash with the €20,560 all players are guaranteed from the €3,152,175 prize pool, although he will be eyeing the top prize as much as anyone else.
The other Irish names still in the field are Oliver Boyce (6,400,000), and short stacks Robert Shanley (3,300,000), Adrian Thorne (3,050,000), and Aidan Quinlan (1,425,000). Meanwhile, the chip lead is in the hands of Finland's Tero Laurila. He will bring 13,075,000 chips into Day 4, slightly more than online qualifier David Tous, who plays a stack of 12,125,000 chips.
Day 4 Top Ten Chip Counts
| Rank | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tero Laurila | Finland | 13,075,000 | 52 |
| 2 | David Tous | Spain | 12,125,000 | 49 |
| 3 | Ninh Van Hiep | Ireland | 9,700,000 | 39 |
| 4 | Stephen Groom | United Kingdom | 9,050,000 | 36 |
| 5 | Konstantinos Vatseris | Greece | 8,875,000 | 36 |
| 6 | Brian Moore | United States | 8,000,000 | 32 |
| 7 | Mark Johnston | United Kingdom | 6,950,000 | 28 |
| 8 | Oliver Boyce | Ireland | 6,400,000 | 26 |
| 9 | Georgios Tsouloftas | Cyprus | 6,100,000 | 24 |
| 10 | Padraig Parkinson | Ireland | 4,600,000 | 18 |
The final 14 players will return to blinds of 100,000/250,000 with a 250,000 big blind ante and all levels will continue to be 60 minutes in length, as they have been from the start of Day 2. A break will be had after every two levels, but other than that the tournament will not stop before a winner is crowned.
The PokerNews live reporting will be on a 30-minute delay as to not spoil the cards-up live stream, hosted on PokerStars' Twitch and YouTube channels. Stay tuned to follow the thrilling conclusion of the 2024 Irish Open Main Event and to find out who takes home the trophy.