Home / Poker News August 2009 / EPT Kyiv – Day 3: a short affair
EPT Kyiv – Day 3: a short affair
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2009-08-23 13:06
Day 3 of the EPT’s Kyiv stop, the first of season 6, was an extremely short affair. The mission that the remaining field of 68 was faced with was to play down to 32 survivors, and they achieved that without ever breaking a sweat, over the course of just four levels of play. No significant changes of any sort occurred. Max Lykov, who finished Day 2 in the chip lead, retained that same position after Day 3 was in the books too.
This Kyiv event caught organizers by surprise in more ways than one. First of all, the planned Moscow event had to be cancelled and moved to Kyiv, secondly, there was a surprise power outage that tested the organizers grit, and the initial starting field that came together was kind of smallish despite the fact that everyone tried to keep a smiling, content face about it.
Day 3 had a surprise of its own too. Originally meant to wither the field down to the final 3 tables (24 players), Day 3 started out at a breakneck pace which prompted the organizers to shorten it, in order to keep some players at the tables for Day 4.
Arnaud Mattern was amongst those who actively contributed to the scary pace of early eliminations on Day 3. He shoved all-in on his pocket Js, only to be met with a call from Sergey Antonenko, who held pocket Qs. That hand was Mattern’s swansong, but it didn’t take long for other well known players to follow him to the rail. John Cernuto was eliminated too, shortly after Mattern and Lia Gerasimova, the last woman remaining in the field followed them to the rail as well.
During the first 75 minutes, the action was hot from every angle. 17 players headed home, while short-stacks kept doubling up and contributing to the general bustle.
This was how the first break found the field.
51 players returned to action after the break, and picked up right where they left off. Raoul Refos headed to the rail first, followed by Francesco Ciriani who trusted his tournament life to an As,Ks he’d picked up. Sure enough he was called by Vadim Markushevski’s Ah, Qh, but as the flop landed J,Q,6, and the turn and the river failed to bail him out, there wasn’t much he could do but shrug his shoulders.
Ciriani’s elimination put the bubble within grasp of the remaining field so the pace of the action dropped to a near crawl. Short stacks began to double up thus staving off elimination and prolonging the death-lock on the bubble.
Ruslan Prydryk was eliminated next by Ilya Gorodetskiy, and the money bubble was reached. Eventually, the unlucky fate of becoming the bubble boy befell Serguei Pomerantsev whose Ah, Qh lost out to Jonas Kronwitter’s pocket Js. With the bubble-hurdle out of the way, the remaining field relaxed and eliminations started flowing once again. Jorg Peisert fell, together with David Aslanyan and former chip leaders Mihaylo Demidenko and Viktor Ivanov.
