Home / Poker News December 2015 / EPT Prague High Roller Kicks Off
EPT Prague High Roller Kicks Off
Posted by: Randy Williams - Wed, 2015-12-09 08:13
The first day of the
EPT Prague's €50k High Roller went into the books the other day, with Luuk Gieles clinching the provisional chip lead. The poker tournament saw no fewer than 42 unique buy-ins go into the middle, which is quite a performance indeed, considering the buy-in level. In addition to all that, 3 re-buys were registered as well, so the total number of buy-ins that ended up in the prize-pool was 50. Registration will however remain open till the beginning of Day 2, so that number may still change.
After a day of hard-fought poker, some 33 players remained in contention. The chip leader, Luuk Gieles from the Netherlands, had a little over 1 million chips bagged. Gieles played well through the day: in fact, he was the one who scored the first elimination of the tournament, bouncing defending champion Leonid Markin early on. Markin then re-bought and he eventually made the cut, but he finished with only 76k chips, as the second shortest stack.
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Despite the fact that not many players ended up eliminated on Day 1, due to the pro-heavy nature of the field, quite a few pros bit the dust. Juha Helppi was one of them, as was John Juanda, Anthony Zinno and Henrik Hecklen. Juanda had an up-and-down run: he started out aggressively, bluffing left and right and he lost most of his stack this way. He then worked his way back up, only to end up dropping all his chips during the last level of the day.
Ole Schemion and Igor Kurganov on the other hand both advanced, on very healthy stacks no less.
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