Home / Poker News September 2010 / PartyPoker qualifier looking to win WPT London
PartyPoker qualifier looking to win WPT London
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2010-09-05 15:10
Playing one’s way into a high prize-pool live poker tournament for a few bucks or Poker Points is always a great bargain. Nobody would testify in favor of that statement more eagerly than Giovanni Safina, who’d earned his WPT London seat via
PartyPoker and who led the event at the end of its third day, with 18 players left in contention. A lawyer from Palermo, Safina has been involved with online poker for quite a while. As a matter of fact, he did not win his WPT London seat via one of the regular satellites. He finished 3rd in Party Poker’s Premier League IV, to pocket a $156k prize and to earn a $100k contract with Team PartyPoker. The real story of Day 3 was not Safina’s though.
21 year old online qualifier Kristoffer Thorsson, who was 3rd in chips at the end of day 3, was the talk of town. The Swede won the Amsterdam Master Classics for a large €600K+ cash, and he qualified for the WPT London. As an online qualifier, he may yet secure a $1 million Party Poker bonus, half of which would end up in his account and the other half would be distributed among the other players who earned their WPT London seats at PartyPoker, in case he won the event.
Thorsson said that while the extra dough hanging in the balance added extra pressure for him, it also meant that meant that a whole bunch of players would root for him.
Phil Ivey, Huck Seed and Erik Seidel all took part in the
poker tournament, though none of their names would grace the stat-sheet once the field had whittled down to 18. No real “name” players remained in contention in the wake of day3, with the possible exception of
EPT Deauville winner Jake Cody. The money bubble is set for 16th place so it is yet to burst.
