Home / Poker News August 2010 / EPT Vilamoura Day 1A – the action kicks off
EPT Vilamoura Day 1A – the action kicks off
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2010-08-29 12:54
181 players showed up at the Casino Vilamoura for the PokerStars EPT’s Day 1A, chasing after the European summer and after the massive prize-pool that the event would hopefully generate. The size of the
PokerStars reception held a day before, gave organizers legit hopes that at least as many would get rolling on Day 1B too.
The first Day 1 flight saw a total of 79 players hit the rail, their
EPT title hopes gone up in smoke.
The structure of the
poker tournament made for some extremely interesting action. the 30k deep stacks gave players plenty of room to maneuver, and that was exactly what most of the survivors did. PokerStars’ Arnaud Mattern dropped about half his stack before he gained some traction and vaulted straight into the lead at about mid-day. He played it cautiously from there on though and he managed to survive the day on a top-5 stack that instantly turned him into one of the top contenders for the title.
The French contingent as a whole had a pretty outstanding day 1A. Michel Abecassis finished as one of the large-stacks. Ludovic Lacay and Anthony Lellouche did well too.
Several “name” players made it through the Day 1A hurdle. Alan Baekke was among them, together with Pieter de Korver, Vicky Coren and Anton Wigg. Annette Obrestad played as well, but she busted out towards the later stages of the day. Barny Boatman and Liam Flood were among those eliminated too.
Dario Minieri hit the warpath towards the evening, coming out swinging and collecting 160k chips at one point. He did drop some of those before the day’s end but he finished on a more than healthy stack nonetheless.
The Day 1A chip lead ended up with one of the Portuguese players though: Andre Coimbra amassed a stack of 157,600 chips to finish on top.
