A Full Fall
Aruba and London
October and November seem to be among the busiest months on the poker calendar, with regular circuit events, one-off specials, and TV tournaments galore to choose from, not to mention the occasional foreign trip to be taken, bankroll
permitting. While the furthest afield, the
Aruba Poker Classic, was short on Brits (a couple of exceptions being Tim Blake and Nick Wright, who cashed for the second year running), the home-grown
Grosvenor UK Poker Tour continued to attract larger and larger fields. The London leg ended up with three starting days to cope with its 433 eventual entrants - perhaps a sign of extensions to come whenever a tournament looks to be drawing more people than it can accommodate.
With a prize pool of nearly half a million pounds, this was the stop on the
GUKPT that most players wanted to attend, and a mixture of the usual poker travellers, sponsored players, and more satellite qualifiers than usual showed up to try their luck. The field was peppered with foreign visitors, too, and one of them came out on top - Leo Kam, a soft-spoken Canadian, in the UK on a one-year work visa, who will undoubtedly have a much better time now that he's £120,000 better off. He said as the cameras wrapped up on the trophy presentation that he was definitely intending to play more events, as will probably most of the players who made it to the final with him - none of whom seemed to be strangers to the cardroom. Nick "Gwibbo" Gibson and Ian Cox were among them; both are successful tournament players, the latter popping up at more final tables this season than most. They were joined by England's Robert Boon (runner-up), Michael Bale, John Kabbaj, and Brian Gilbert, as well as American Carl Buskirk and relocated Swede Patrik Selin.
Plymouth and Baden
The
GUKPT has been so successful that the 2008 lineup of events is already generating interest before the first year is wrapped up in December with the £3,000 grand final. Even at triple the regular buy-in, this event is still cheaper than the new
European Poker Tour, now €8,000 a pop. While the two tours aren't catering to exactly the same players, and the prominence of the
EPT in Europe cannot be denied, it is hard to forego comparison between them. What the European tour may gain in exclusivity and save in the way of logistical problems for venues, it appears to have lost in becoming so expensive that even sponsors are leery of committing to a series that will cost nearly double what it would have last year. Pros playing on their own bankrolls also have to pick and choose a few events rather than short-hop their way around the continent all year-round. Numbers suffered in Baden (282) and Ireland (221), and while it's clearly tough to find a solution to the problem of popularity (namely, tournaments selling out in a matter of days), only time will tell if online qualifiers or guests travelling from the U.S. will end up boosting their numbers back up to their 2006 peak.
The
EPT event in Baden, however, saw the best result for a UK player for some time, namely Julian Thew, who took home €670,800 and his first title. Fresh from winning the
GUKPT Plymouth leg, the William Hill-sponsored player was tipped for the top spot as he lived up to his "Yo-Yo" nickname, accumulating chips in the unorthodox manner for which he is
well-known. He made the final almost neck and neck with Vladimir Poleshchuk, with almost double the stack of the next in chips. After a whirlwind start, in which Anton Allemann, Ted Lawson, and Manfred Hammer exited in a matter of minutes, the final took on a more sedate, if hard-fought, pace. Holland's Thierry van den Berg finished fifth, Thomas Fuller fourth, Poleshchuk third, and Hungarian Denes Kalo second. Thew, a popular player who is well-known for his seemingly contradictory laid-back personality and aggressive and unpredictable playing style, has several results at previous EPT events studding his list of poker achievements, but this win is by far his largest live cash to date, and one with which he is understandably delighted.
Dublin, Estonia, and Amsterdam
Before the Irish
EPT event, and around the filming of the 888
UK Poker Open and the new series of
Late Night Poker, there was just enough time to squeeze in the
Grosvenor Grand Prix back in the UK - if you'd managed to qualify for it. Unique in format in that no direct entry to the
Grand Prix is possible, the tournament was full of value to the tune of £70,000 added by sponsor Blue Square after the 1,276 attempts to qualify left the prize pool short of its £300,000 guarantee. A pot-limit hold'em event, with prizes for everyone just for showing up (£100 even for finishing last) for the four-day tournament, was won by Marcus Bebb-Jones, with Paul Rodgers second, and Richard Simmonds third. Also making the final were Ashfag Ahmed, Jeff Burke, Amrat Patel, Paul Vicary, Anthony Kennedy, and Ved Madan.
There was a 24-hour turnaround for
Grand Prix players to get to the Royal Dublin Society for the
EPT; it's lucky that it's just a one-hour flight away. Among the British contenders were last year's champion Roland de Wolfe, Ram Vaswani, Surinder Sunar, Jeff Kimber, and Praz Bansi, while Martin Green and Ash Hussain were the only representatives of the UK to make the money.
It was young Norwegian Annette Obrestad, fresh from winning the
World Series of Poker Europe main event, who was responsible for eliminating many of the favourites in this event, including enigmatic Irishman Andy Black, before eventually finishing second to Reuben Peters. Simultaneously running were tournaments in Estonia, the Fitzwilliam Club in Dublin, and the beginning of the Amsterdam
Master Classics, so expect next month to be as frenetic as this one.
Jen Mason is a part of www.blondepoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.
