Paul Runcan leads final table in largest EPT Prague Main Event

No matter how huge a tournament field, eventually all the chips are on one table (not literally all the chips from the start; after five days of play the big blind now equals five Main Event starting stacks). Holding 120 of those big blinds is chip leader Paul Runcan, having extended his start-of-day lead to the point where he now holds twice the stack of his nearest rival, EPT veteran Pedro Marques.

It took all day to set the line-up for the final table, dropping the field from 16 to six. The biggest-ever €5,300 EPT Prague Main Event will have a new champion on Sunday at King’s Casino Prague, one of the last remaining players from a starting field of 1,458. That player stands to collect €1,146,500 in prize money from a €7,071,300 total prize pool.

Sylwia Studniarz, a Polish ex-poker reporter, was eliminated in 13th place, picking up her third ever live cash (a most encouraging €68,050 for the woman who said that though nighclubs were now her business, poker was her 'heart').

Sylwia Studniarz on the tournament floor to play, not report

Umberto Ruggeri, third in this event last year for €459,240, finished in 11th place (€81,600), leaving the final table bubble spot to Vidar Oie (€81,600). Though Oie’s eliminator Barak Oz then busted Danut Chisu in 9th, his final table place shortly hung in the balance when all-in flipping against Anton Bergstrom; that double has kept him in with a shot at the title.

Bergstrom has not only made an EPT final before (Barcelona 2005) but has reached the latter stages of the EPT Prague Main Event two years in a row. Last year he finished 24th for €27,000; now he lies third in chips on the final, guaranteed a payout of at least €233,050.

Anton Bergstrom, scarily consistent in Prague

The last eliminations of the day were those of Siegfried Kapeller and Tjenno Eskes. Kapeller’s shot at doubling with an all-in preflop flip did not turn out as well as Oz’s and he had to settle for 8th place. Eskes, all in preflop with a suited ace-six vs. chip leader Runcan’s differently-suited king-ten had to leave it in the deck’s hands, too; the deck handed his opponent a straight.

EPT Prague €5,300 Main Event final table 

The final table is live-streamed on the PokerStars YouTube channel; if you saw any of the drama on Day 5 (let’s just say Runcan isn’t shy to bluff in public), you’ll want to tune in. If you didn't, it might be worth a watch.

Tedeschi wins inaugural EPT Mixed 10-Game Main Event

The brainchild of mixed-game super-enthusiasts Tobias Leknes and PokerStars Ambassador Georgina ‘GJReggie' James became a fully-fledged €2,200 Mixed Game Main Event in a matter of months. Now it boasts its first champion, Paul Tedeschi.

Paul Tedeschi with the maximum number of cards in an EPT winner's photo

Currently 20th on France’s all-time money list, Tedeschi has proven himself before in 8-Game, Stud, PLO8 and HORSE, as well as plenty of No Limit Hold’em events over the last decade. Now he takes home €44,900 and the first EPT Main Event trophy (the big, gold kind) to be awarded in Mixed Games – and they aren’t even allowed to be played in France.

That’s right, only Hold’em and Omaha are allowed in France. The first EPT Mixed Games champion’s options to crush 10-Game in his country of birth are limited. That probably won’t matter, as the worldwide popularity of multi-variant poker is rising slowly but surely, as this year’s Prague festival proves. There were 83 entries into this three-day, slow-structured Main Event (if anything, a bit too slow for Tedeschi’s liking).

Tedeschi seemed in control from the start of the final to the end. Three handed, stacks were deep as a free-dive training pool, and the battle between Tedeschi, Jeremy Trojand and Ali Abdulzahra raged (quietly) for over three hours.

It was Trojand who eventually fell in third place (€20,680), leaving a table tilting with the weight of chips in front of the Frenchman. It took less than a full flip-through of the 10-Game keyring for Abdulzahra to hit the rail, picking up €28,960, his second-biggest live cash.

Having missed him on Day 2, PokerOrg finally got to ask Tedeschi what his 11th game would be. “Can I have two?” he asked. Well, he is the inaugural champion. “Baduci and Badacey."

As the final Stud Hi-Lo hand came to its last card reveal (aces vs kings on fourth remaining the best hand for each), a cheer went up from the neighbouring tables, where the €550 8-Game had clearly collected all of the busted players from the Main. Many of them will have played with today’s finalists and, just as Georgina James said, it’s a niche and friendly world.

EPT Prague Mixed Game Main Event payouts

Teun Mulder bests 8 players in €10K High Roller; 3 of them were Steve O’Dwyer

With a glut of events worldwide in the past fortnight vying for the bankrolls of the super-high-rolling players, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the big buy-in events here in Prague have been a little sparsely attended.

Thomas Santerne is undoubtedly delighted that he chose the EPT for his pre-Christmas HR shots as he has won three events during the festival, banking winnings totalling over €690,000. He was denied a fourth trophy by Dutch crusher Teun Mulder, however, on Saturday, in the one-table €10,200 High Roller, despite firing two bullets.

There were nine entries, three from Steve O’Dwyer, who exited in fourth, before bubble Santerne. Mulder, top of the all-time money list for the Netherlands with over $7 million in live tournament earnings, bested Enrico Camosci (no slouch himself, that fifth-highest Italian tourney earner, with $4.7 million) heads up to secure €56,710.

Opening rounds of live-action Spin & Go

After a small test-run at EPT Barcelona, the first €100,000 GTD 81-player Spin & Go Live Championship is now most certainly live at EPT Prague. The opening rounds were concluded in batches on dinky custom three-person poker tables with all of the excitement of the online version, and a first-to-four-wins opening structure gave everyone who had travelled from the far-flung reaches of the globe a fair shot at progression.

Felix Schneiders in action in the Spin & Go Live Championship

The event is invite-only - open to 74 PokerStars Spin & Go qualifiers and seven special guests, with a €25,000 top payout for the eventual winner on Sunday.

How it works (courtesy of the PokerStars Blog’s explainer):

Round 1: 81 players across 27 tables. Four wins are required to reach Round 2

Round 2: 27 players across nine tables. Five wins are required to reach Round 3; €30,000 in random mystery envelope prizes between €2,000 and €10,000

Round 3: Nine players across three tables. Five wins are required to reach the Final Round; €7,300 in prizes according to ranking and €17,000 in random mystery envelope prizes

Final Round: Three players across one table. €25,000 for first; €15,000 for second; €10,000 for third.

Crushed ice: Thumm, Bansal and Kunchan win outside casino

They only needed 3/4 of a team to win

The main reason many players pick EPT Prague as their favourite stop is that there is so much to see and do within a relatively compact area. As well as the famous Christmas market, museums and undeniably beautiful city center, there are activities put on by PokerStars Travel to tempt people from the cosy luxury of the Hilton. A river cruise last week, for example, as well as an earlier ice curling competition (which Barny Boatman’s team won, to his apparent delight):

PokerOrg joined forces with Parisian Bachir Boumahdaf and Brice Guido from Monaco, plus ‘Pingu’ from Switzerland, to take on seven other teams at the EPT Prague Ice Curling side event (it counts; there are mini-spade trophies involved).

Strictly, the game wasn’t the curling you know from the Winter Olympics, with the brushing part (the gesture for this crosses all language barriers) but Eisstockschiessen, a sort of mash-up of curling and pétanque popular in German-speaking countries.

Team Pingu Power sporting superlative merch parkas

You can find out a lot meeting (and competing with) players from around the world without narrowing the focus to counting each other’s stacks and talking about hand ranges.

We were interested to learn, for example, that Swiss casinos tend to have limited capacity (140 seats max) and that the other live poker options are ‘clubs’ with a max buy-in of €200 and the ubiquitous, mysterious private game network. According to our enlightening team captain (who used to play full-time) it is nice to have PokerStars.ch now in Switzerland but, “It would have been great to separate us because there are a lot of people with money that don’t know how to play. Switzerland probably puts among the highest numbers of fish into the player pool!”

Despite everyone claiming not to have curled before, there were clearly some ringers in the field. Team Sacarimo’s every move was caught on camera and they team-huddled like pros (unsurprisingly), while Team Yellow breezed through to tie the top spot and go to a sudden death round.

Yellow was down a fourth team member, but that proved no obstacle as Lisa Thumm from Germany and India’s Paawan Bansal and Kanchan Sharma outperformed in the tie-break to seal the win and pick up gold medals and mini-spades. The former was introduced to poker by her brother Niclas and admits it is ‘in her blood’, while the latter two are heading straight into the €2,200 Deep Stack, presumably with a morale boost from this sporting win.

“Bricking it hard,” said Sharma, when asked how she’d been performing at EPT Prague.

“This is the only thing we’ve won!” added Bansal.  Both intended to shake the ice from their shoes and immediately jump into the €2,200 Deep Stack; at time of writing Bansal was just navigating the Day 2 bubble.

^{Images courtesy of Rational Intellectual Holdings Ltd}