Home / Poker News January 2011 / PokerStars’ World Cup of Poker VII – tag team poker at its best
PokerStars’ World Cup of Poker VII – tag team poker at its best
Posted by: Randy Williams - Sun, 2011-01-23 10:09
PokerStars’ World Cup of Poker VII took place on January 15th at the PCA, pitting the 4-member national teams of 9 countries against one another, in a truly epic showdown of tag team tournament poker. In the end, it was the team of Italy (Litterio Pirrotta, Ravel Furfaro, Ravel Scafati, Marco Mancini and Luca Pagano – yes, THE Luca Pagano) that walked away with the victory.
The final table lasted for a massive 11 hours, and the victorious Italians needed every minute of it to dispose of the other 8 teams to get their hands on the $100k top prize.
Due to the rather peculiar structure of the event, we’ll assume you do not know the rules so here they are: each team member played at the final table for 20 minutes. After that, they were replaced by a teammate. Responsible for determining the order in which players stepped onto the field of deeds was the team captain, who – in Italy’s case – was
PokerStars’ own Luca Pagano.
If a player was sent to the rail before all his team’s chips were brought into action, the next player would step in immediately.
The 9 final table teams had garnered their stacks through a series of preliminaries.
France was the team that brought the most chips to the final table: namely a stack of 50k. Team USA was the official short-stack with 25k chips.
Because of the rather cumbersome rules that governed the action, the first elimination, that of the Philippines came a good 5 hours into the final table. Team USA departed from the table next, followed shortly by Argentina, sent to the rail by Ukraine.
Team France then put team Spain out of its misery after it had absorbed a few nasty hits earlier to find itself crippled.
Team Slovakia followed them out the door. Team France got it all-in too against Ukraine, and was in turn eliminated. Ukraine followed on the casualty list. UK and Italy battled it out heads-up with the win ending up in Pagano’s Team’s possession.
