Home / Poker News December 2011 / PokerStars EPT Prague – Day 1B Report
PokerStars EPT Prague – Day 1B Report
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2011-12-07 10:09
The second day 1 flight of the EPT Prague Main Event drew a larger starting field than day 1A: 488 players bellied up to the tables, taking the total number of registrants to 722 – a new record for the event. Not only did the event break the previous EPT record, it broke every record ever set by a live poker tournament hosted in the Czech Republic. With a record-breaking field of participants came a record-breaking prize-pool and a first-place prize of €775k.
The day consisted of 8 levels, during which almost half of the initial starting field withered away: 274 players were left in contention when the hostilities were stopped. Andrey Saenko managed to amass a stack of 200.8k chips, which put him on top of the chip counts for Day1b, while giving him the overall chip lead as well. Because of the higher number of Day 1B starters, no fewer than 8 players were able to build stacks exceeding that of the Day 1A chip leader.
Like Day 1A, Day 1B drew quite a number of Team PokerStars pros: Lex Veldhuis, Liv Boeree, Jude Ainsworth, Luca Pagano and Bertrand Grospellier were all there, together with Martin Hruby, one of the two Czech Team PokerStars members.
Hruby had a decent day but he failed to add any chips to his starting stack. Eventually, he finished with about 20k chips.
Dag Palovic from Slovakia had struck a prop bet with Hruby before the tournament, the terms of which required him to show up in drag. The costume didn’t seem to bother him as he finished with a healthy stack of 73.2k chips.
Pius Heinz, the current
WSOP Main Event champion also played. Unlike most of the other PokerStars pros, he failed to make it past the Day 1B hurdle: he dropped a huge pot to Dominik Nitsche, which left him crippled. He busted out a few hands later.
