Online Poker Player Toby Lewis Wins EPT Vilamoura

Toby Lewis EPT Vilamoura survived to win his first major live poker tournament.

Three British poker players came in ahead of five other Europeans at the EPT Vilamoura final table, and the young man who started the day with the advantage ended up walking away the winner.

Teddy Sheringham started the day in third place and mostly played a tight game while the rest of the table duked it out with his fellow Brit Sam Trickett. The former England international soccer star did manage one knockout when his 5-5 held up against A-J to send Frederick Jensen out in sixth place. But he finished the day in fifth place when he flopped top pair with K-Q only to see that Martin Jacobson’s Q-J had flopped a straight, earning him €93,120 ($119,454).

Sam Trickett came in essentially tied for the chip lead, and his active stance at the table made it clear that he wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than going for it all. The former pro soccer player stayed aggressive throughout the day but the deck conspired against him the entire time; he lost with A-8 to K-7, J-J to Q-Q, A-3 to K-J, A-K to A-2, and with T-5 on a T-T-4 board when his opponent held 4-4. The sheer size of his starting stack helped to buffer him against some of those losses, but in the end a massive coin flip with deuces against Martin Jacobson’s Q-J was the last thing that would go wrong for Trickett. A jack on the flop secured a fourth-place exit, and €139,680 ($179,181), for him.

The last British player at the table was none other than incoming chip leader and online poker star Toby “810ofclubs” Lewis. He entered heads-up play at a 3-to-2 chip disadvantage against Jacobson but he had turned that to a 3-to-2 lead by the time the players reached their first break, extending it even further before Jacobson won with 7-7 to Lewis’ A-8 to nearly even things back up. But Lewis held onto the lead long enough to find himself in a perfect situation, turning a disguised set of fives that gave Jacobson two pair and getting him to five-bet all-in drawing to just two outs. Neither of those outs came on the river, and Lewis became the second consecutive online player to win an EPT event.

Jacobson settled for €297,984 ($382,105), the biggest cash of his career ahead of a second-place finish at last year’s WPT Venice. Toby Lewis, meanwhile, gets the breakthrough he’d been waiting for in live tournaments and takes home €467,835 ($599,905) to boot.