Tamas Kabatnic Leads After PokerStars Festival Bucharest Main Event Day 1a
A total of 177 players entered Day 1a of the €1,100 PokerStars Festival Bucharest Main Event and by the end of eight levels of play there were just 66 players remaining, led by Tamas Kabatnic.
In May 2016, the Romanian capital attracted a field of 579 for the first and only Eureka Tour event held here, and in the end Avishai Shitrit from Israel took down the tournament and €107,350 in prize money.
Tamas Kabatnic was all smiles after bagging the end-of-the-day chip lead. "I'm excited for Friday, for Day 2, hopefully I can keep the chip lead," Kabatnic said. It wasn't all smooth sailing for the Romanian, who found himself on the brink of elimination in the third level of the day.
"I had ace-queen on an ace-queen-nine flop but my opponent held pocket queens," Kabatnic recalled. "I asked the dealer for the ace of spades on the turn and guess what: the turn was the ace of spades! I doubled to 60,000 in that hand. After that, I won a couple more big pots to build my stack."
Kabatnic has just one recorded live cash, back in 2014, and is primarily an online cash game player. However, the combination of the PokerStars Festival coming to his home country combined with the massive €500,000 guarantee made him switch from the digital to the live felt. "The guarantee really worked; I usually play like three tournaments a year but I really wanted to play this one. I bought in directly after not cashing in a few satellites," Kabatnic concluded.
Today the excitement in the air was palpable as a selection of players from around Europe, and a strong home contingent of Romanians joined the field. The most notable player was probably Romania’s all-time money list leader Alexandru Papazian, who earlier this year took down a WSOP bracelet event to win both he and his country’s first bracelet.
Papazian started strongly, eliminating a player holding pocket kings when Papazian’s pocket fours made a set. Sadly, for Papazian he was eliminated midway through the last level of the day in a hand against Andrei Nodea.
“My day wasn’t going very good until this hand,” said Nodea, who said he knew that Papazian had recently won Romania’s first WSOP bracelet. “It was a three-way hand, and it shows that you just need a couple of hands that work very well and now I’m up to 196,000!”
Also in the field was PokerStars Championship Monte Carlo sensation Andreas Klatt. Klatt took down the huge 1,252 field National Championship and followed it up with a second-place finish in the Main Event for combined cashes of over €450,000.
Unfortunately, like Papazian, Klatt failed to make it through to Day 2.
There are still two more flights in the PokerStars Festival Bucharest Main Event, both of which take place tomorrow (Thursday 3rd August). Day 1b kicks off at 1 p.m. with players battling through ten 45-minute levels to secure a spot in Day 2. Players due in the 1b field include PokerStars Team Pro Chris Moneymaker and Team Online’s Lex Veldhuis, with British pro Sam Grafton also expected to make an appearance.
Then later on, at 9 p.m. there is a special 1c flight, which is open only to players who have busted out of either 1a or 1b. This is a turbo edition with ten levels of only 20 minutes being played.