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PokerStars EPT Warsaw – Day 1A
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2009-10-23 15:30
Day 1A of the fourth stop of the
PokerStars sponsored EPT kicked off at the Hyatt Hotel in Warsaw with a starting field of 88 players. The buy-in was approximately $9,000 but that didn’t mean those looking for EPT glory would back down. When the day was called after the last hand, of the 88 initial starters only 64 were still standing, ready to have their stacks moved to a Day 2 table.
Of the 88 players, many were Team PokerStars professionals. Arnaud Mattern, Luca Pagano, Alex Kravchenko, Martin Horecki and JC Alvarado were all there. The champions were well represented too. 2008
WSOP Main Event Champion Peter Eastgate arrived a little late, but
EPT Barcelona winner Carter Phillips was on time and on target for most of the day.
Except for Guillen and Alvarado, all the above mentioned players survived to day 2, but Carter Phillips was the one who dominated the action.
As soon as the game kicked off, Phillips swung into action and it didn’t take him long to clinch the chip lead. Three times he went all-in holding some big overpairs and three times he got called by players who failed to get anything going against him. Before he knew it, Phillips had tripled and quadrupled up, his stack twice as high as that of the player nearest to him in the provisional chip count. That player was Clayton Mozdzen, who had accumulated 103,250 chips, well below Phillips’ 194,950.
Luca Pagano finished 3rd for the day, which was a pretty solid performance, especially in light of the fact that he had shared a table with the unstoppable Carter Phillips all day. The Italian managed to avoid a direct confrontation with Phillips though, and Phillips wasn’t keen on locking horns with him either, so the two of them methodically picked the other players at the table apart. Pagano finished with 101,575 chips.
Although the number of day 1A participants is down from last year’s, Day 1B traditionally attracts more entrants, so it may yet make up for the shortfall. Bertrand Grospellier, Florian Langmann, Gus Hansen, Scotty Nguyen and Ludovic Lacay will only get rolling in the second Day 1 flight.
