Posts Tagged ‘london’
Sorel Mizzi Wins 2010 Bluff Magazine Player of the Year
January 3rd, 2011
Mizzi’s success in 2010 was good enough to earn him honors from Bluff.
Pro poker player Sorel Mizzi has been named the 2010 Player of the Year by Bluff Magazine.
Mizzi’s year started off with a bang when he took third place in the Aussie Millions Main Event, good for $659,000. He followed up that performance with a preliminary event win at the Wynn Classic and two preliminary event wins at EPT Snowfest in March and a victory at the Borgata East Coast Poker Championship in Atlantic City in April. A string of big finishes in high roller tournaments followed, with the EPT Grand Final (6th place), WPT Rendez-Vous a Paris (2nd), EPT Tallinn (2nd) and EPT London (5th) big-ticket tournaments providing him more than $525,000 in winnings.
Mizzi didn’t slow down as the end of 2010 approached. He was the TV table bubble boy at the WPT World Poker Finals at Foxwoods in October, good for nearly $89,000, and he made two final tables at the LA Poker Open, including a win in a $1,585 bounty event. The Five Diamond World Poker Classic at Bellagio was the site of Mizzi’s fina impressive performances of 2010: he finished sixth in one preliminary event and then took ninth place in the WPT main event there. All told, his take in 2010 added up to nearly $1.9 million, ranking him 12th on the year’s money list even though he didn’t win a major title.
Finishing in second place in the Bluff Player of the Year race behind Sorel Mizzi was Tom Marchese, who won the 2010 Player of the Year award from Card Player magazine. Other top performers included Fernando Brito, David Peters, Vanessa Selbst, Eric Baldwin, Dwyte Pilgrim, Chris Bjorin, Bluff’s 2009 POY Jason Mercier and Chris Bell.
Tom Marchese Wins Card Player Player of the Year
December 24th, 2010
Merry Christmas, Mr. Player of the Year! (Photo: WJMedia.net)
With the last major tournament of the year now put to bed in Atlantic City, Card Player magazine has its 2010 Player of the Year: live tournament circuit rookie Tom “kingsofcards” Marchese.
Marchese’s year started off in style with his first-ever live tournament cash, a third-place finish at the Borgata Winter Open championship event. It didn’t give him any POY points, but it was good for $190,027. Then Marchese won the NAPT Venetian main event ($827,648), took fourth at the Wynn Classic ($73,356), took fourth at the EPT Grand Final High Roller event ($350,125) and finished sixth at the WSOP $10,000 Pot-Limit Hold’em World Championship ($123,364), all by the end of the summer.
From there Marchese upped the ante with final table appearances at EPT London (7th, $157,159), the WPT Foxwoods World Poker Finals (3rd, $211,759) and the NAPT Los Angeles Bounty Shootout (5th, $24,000) before closing out the year with a $45,958 win in a $1,000 rebuy tournament at Bellagio’s Five Diamond World Poker Classic. All told, his two titles and 11 final tables earned him more than $2.1 million in 2010.
The incredible year for Marchese overshadowed another impressive year from Dwyte Pilgrim, whose five titles (including the WPT Borgata Poker Open), 13 final tables and $1 million in earnings were good for second place on the Card Player POY list. The rest of the top five was made up of Borgata Spring Poker Open champ Sorel Mizzi, NAPT Mohegan Sun and Partouche Poker Tour winner Vanessa Selbst, and 2010 WSOP Main Event runner-up John Racener.
Tom Marchese joins some pretty select company as the Card Player Player of the Year. Past winners have included Michael Mizrachi, Eric Baldwin, Men “The Master” Nguyen, T.J. Cloutier, John Phan, David Pham and Daniel Negreanu.
Vanessa Selbst Wins Partouche Poker Tour Grand Final
November 8th, 2010
Vanessa Selbst scored her second major victory of 2010 this weekend.
While the poker world’s eyes were fixed on Las Vegas this weekend for the conclusion of the WSOP Main Event, one of the game’s top young talents was busy laying claim to her second major tournament title of the year.
Vanessa Selbst held the chip lead in the Partouche Poker Tour Grand Final when play was suspended, November-Nine-style, back in September. This weekend she returned to the Palm Beach Casino in Cannes, France, to play out the final table, and the chip lead served her well. She was able to outlast a lineup of experienced professional poker players, including veteran French pro Fabrice Soulier, former EPT Grand Final High Roller winner Tobias Reinkemeier and former Danish Poker Championships winner Søren Kongsgaard. One player Selbst didn’t have to contend with was former WPT Spanish Championship winner Ali Tekintamgac, who was disqualified by PPT officials prior to the final table on charges that he used confederates posing as members of the media to gain an unfair advantage over his competitors.
For the win, the sixth on her four-year live tournament resume, Vanessa Selbst earned €1,300,000 (US $1,825,720) and a trophy that’s nearly as big as she is. Along with her winnings from her victory at the NAPT Mohegan Sun main event, her fourth-place finish at the EPT London High Roller event and a handful of other scores in Australia, Europe and North America, her PPT earnings mean she has now won more than $2.8 million in 2010. With total career live tournament earnings of $3.76 million she is now the third-winningest woman in poker history, trailing only tournament veterans Kathy Liebert and Annie Duke.
Tom Marchese, Live Poker Rookie of the Year
November 5th, 2010
Nobody new to live poker tournaments has had a 2010 like Tom Marchese.
There are lot of awards handed out in the poker world every year, but they tend to be scattered around different locales and are far from comprehensive. If there were a comprehensive set of awards, though, it would be hard to find a more qualified candidate for Rookie of the Year in 2010 than Tom Marchese.
Primarily an online cash game player under the screen name “kingsofcards” before 2010, Marchese decided to hit the live tournament circuit at the beginning of this year with a stop at the Borgata Winter Open in Atlantic City. He took third place in the main event there, good for $190,027 – not a bad way to get the first live tournament cash of your career. Three weeks later Marchese had one-upped himself, defeating Sam Stein in heads-up play at the NAPT Venetian main event to lay claim to the $827,648 top prize. Just two months into the calendar year, that put him well over $1 million in earnings for 2010.
Marchese didn’t stop there, though. He followed those scores up with a cash at the WPT’s Bay 101 main event ($20,500) and a fourth-place finish at the Wynn Poker Classic main event ($73,356) before moving on to Europe, where he took fourth place in the EPT Grand Final High Roller tournament ($350,125). Toss in two WSOP cashes, including a sixth-place finish in the $10,000 Pot Limit Hold’em World Championship ($123,364), and final-table finishes at the Empire State Hold’em Championships ($31,117) and the EPT London main event ($156,490), and Marchese’s take through September was better than many top-notch players’ career-best years. Then in October he added three more cashes to his resume, including a third-place finish at the recent WPT Foxwoods World Poker Finals main event good for $211,759.
Only three players (November Niner Michael Mizrachi, EPT Grand Final champ Nicolas Chouity and PCA Main Event champ Harrison Gimbel) have earned more at the live tournament tables than Marchese in 2010. All of them had resume entries from before 2010, while Tom Marchese has $2,036,033 in live tournament cashes all dating back to this January. That’s enough to make him our official nominee for the nonexistent award of 2010′s Live Poker Rookie of the Year.
Final Table Set at WSOP Circuit Regional Championship
October 27th, 2010
Foxwoods ambassador and ESPN poker analyst Bernard Lee will play at today’s big WSOPC final table.
There are times when a major poker tournament will have a slew of well-known players left as play approaches the final table, getting everyone’s hopes up for a big showdown only to see the big names fall by the wayside as a crew of unknowns makes it way to the televised finale. The first WSOP Circuit Regional Championship looked like it might succumb to that fate on Day 3, but instead a number of accomplished players advanced to the final nine at the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Ind.
Gabe Patgorski, who was originally listed by tournament officials under his first name, John, will take 2,263,000 chips into the final table, giving him a healthy lead on the rest of the field. Patgorski led the tournament at the conclusion of Day 2 as well. Behind him is online star David “Doc” Sands with 1,360,000 chips, the only other player over the one-million-chip mark. Sands will be hoping to bring his $186,417 in live tournament cashes a little more in line with the $2.26 million he’s won online.
Third in chips with 905,000 is Shannon Shorr, who cashed five times at this year’s WSOP to bring his total career live tournament earnings up to about $3.3 million. Right behind Shorr with 863,000 chips is Curt Kohlberg, who would boost his career earnings by about 50 percent if he were to win this tournament’s $525,449 top prize. From there the chip counts drop off a bit, but ESPN poker analyst Bernard Lee (401,000 chips) and Harvard instructor/poker pro Brandon Adams (155,000), who missed out on his first WSOP bracelet this summer by finishing second to Men Nguyen in the $10,000 Seven-Card Stud World Championship, will make up for their lack of ammunition with drive and desire once the final table begins.
As stacked as today’s lineup is, it could have been even more impressive. But 2010 WSOP Main Event 12th-place man Adam “Roothlus” Levy (20th place), WPT London High Roller winner Justin “Boosted J” Smith (19th), online star Kevin “Stamdogg” Stammen (18th), 2009 WSOP Circuit Harrah’s Atlantic City winner Chris Klodnicki (15th), 2010 WSOP Deuce-to-Seven World Championship winner David “Bakes” Baker (14th), and veteran poker pro Steve Zolotow (10th) all came up a bit short of the final table in Hammond.
The final table of this first WSOP Circuit Regional Championship will be filmed tomorrow for broadcast on the Versus network next year. While the identity of the eventual champion is yet unknown, all nine players – including shorter stacks James Anderson, Mark Owens and Anthony Hartmann – have earned themselves seats in next spring’s WSOPC National Championship. Play gets underway at 2:00 p.m. CT.
London Museum Brings Cezanne Card Player Paintings Together
October 21st, 2010
Paul Cezanne’s paintings of card players are on display together for the first time in London.
A classic group of paintings depicting French peasants playing cards has been brought together for the first time.
Near the end of his career, French impressionist master Paul Cezanne studied peasants in the Aix-en-Provence region of France. The end result was a series of five paintings of peasants playing cards, now famous throughout the world for its honest depiction of a class not often documented in fine art at that time. Curiously enough, those paintings had never been brought together before London’s Courtauld Gallery arranged its new exhibit.
The paintings on display in London come from three sources. The Courtauld Gallery owns one of the pieces, while the two on loan come from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The other two card player paintings by Cezanne – one in a private collection and another belonging to the Barnes Foundation in the United States – were unavailable for the exhibit. The Courtauld’s exhibit also features preparatory paintings and drawings that Cezanne made as he studied the peasants who would eventually become the subjects of his now-famous paintings.
The Courtauld Gallery’s “Cezanne’s Card Players” exhibit opened earlier today in London and runs through January 16 of next year. It will then travel to the Met in New York, where it will be on display from February 9 to May 8.
World Poker Tour London Airs on Five in UK Tonight
October 13th, 2010
Jake Cody (center) will get some serious face time on the telly tonight.
It used to be that there was an extensive time gap between a World Poker Tour tournament being played and the final package hitting television sets around the world. Tonight, however, viewers in the United Kingdom will get to bypass that long delay when the first of four episodes covering last month’s WPT London poker festival airs on Five.
The first half of Five’s WPT London coverage will follow the £5,300 main event, which drew 171 players and was won by the UK’s own Jake Cody. The victory marked his second major win of the year, following up on his success at EPT Deauville in France back in January, and earned him £273,783 (US $425,492). That tournament will stretch across two weeks on the television before Five moves on to the £15,000 High Roller event.
The field in the WPT London High Roller tournament was much smaller at just 19 players, but every one of them was capable of winning the title. In the end American pro Justin “Boosted J” Smith was the winner, taking home £141,000 (US $219,131) after he defeated Tony G in heads-up play. Five will also air two episodes from the High Roller event, bringing its total number WPT London episodes to four.
The quick turnaround should be a welcome sight for UK poker fans, who have read all about the enormous success of their poker pros this year but haven’t had the opportunity to see much of it on the television just yet. WPT London begins airing on Five at 11:55 p.m. tonight.
Tom Dwan Beats Daniel Cates in Short Durrrr Challenge Session
October 8th, 2010
Durrrr knows this challenge is a marathon, not a sprint.
With all the big London tournament action that held up the challenge finally out of the way, Tom “durrrr” Dwan and Daniel “jungleman12″ Cates have managed to put in two sessions of their 50,000-hand competition this week. The first saw the two essentially break even after 582 hands – Dwan actually grabbed a small win, but it was worth just a few big blinds. The second, another short session, came just a few days ago and saw Dwan narrow Cates’ margin a bit.
The two sat down for 258 hands of $100/$200 no-limit hold’em on Tuesday night and while there weren’t any six-figure pots, there was plenty of action. Dwan grabbed the night’s biggest pot, a $90,395 affair where he called a preflop three-bet and a flop lead holding suited rags and then proceeded to go runner-runner for a flush and get Cates to call all-in. At the end of the session Dwan had eked out a win of nearly $32,000, marking his second winner in a row against jungleman12.
Tom Dwan and Daniel Cates have now played 7,660 hands of heads-up poker. That’s just over 15 percent of the 50,000 hands required to complete this installment of the Durrrr Challenge, so there’s still lots of action remaining. Anything could still happen with so far left to go, but for the time being the young upstart can enjoy his advantage, both in terms of number of hands won (4,691 to Dwan’s 2,926) and profit ($657,774).
EPT London Winner Crowned Champion of Champions
October 6th, 2010
David Vamplew added about £9,500 in freerolls to his EPT London take after beating this crew of poker champions.
Just a few days ago David Vamplew had under $7,000 in live poker tournament cashes to his name. Then he added the EPT London championship to his resume to boost his total to nearly $1.5 million. And now he’s freerolling on an entire tour’s worth of tournaments next year thanks to a big victory in a made-for-television tournament.
EPT London, in addition to being the third stop of this season’s European Poker Tour, also served as the Grand Final for the first season of the UK & Ireland Poker Tour. To celebrate the success of the UKIPT’s first go-round, the tour invited the winners of each of its events to play the Champion of Champions event, a sit-and-go with a unique prize: free entry into all of the UKIPT’s Season 2 stops, including the EPT London main event. The lineup included Vamplew and his fellow Season 1 champions Andrew Couldridge, Max Silver, Padraig Parkinson, Nick Risk, Joeri Zandvliet, Femi Fakinle, Gilles Augustus and Jamie Burland.
The 23-year-old Vamplew’s hot streak carried over from EPT London as he maneuvered his way to heads-up play against Burland and finally on to the victory, which gave him a freeroll into eight tournaments over the next year. “I hoped David would get tired after yesterday,” said Burland afterward. “But…he played really good.”
The first tournament on Vamplew’s list of freerolls will take place at the beginning of December in Galway, Ireland, just a quick hop over from Vamplew’s home in Scotland.
David Vamplew Outlasts John Juanda for EPT London Title
October 5th, 2010
You can add Scotland to the 2010 British Poker Honor Roll.
When the poker media have talked about 2010 being a great year for the United Kingdom’s poker players, more often than not they’ve meant English players. But this year’s EPT London main event final table provided a stage for another part of the UK to get in on all this year has had to offer the country’s rounders.
Kyle Bowker and John Juanda were virtually tied for the chip lead when yesterday’s EPT London main event final table started. They were trailed fairly closely by Scotland’s David Vamplew, after whom there was a pretty big gap in the counts. Rather than seeing the kind of short-stack-doubling-up final table shenanigans that often happen at such a final table, the first five players were eliminated in relatively quick order so that the three players who’d brought the most chips to the table were the only ones left when play reached the three-handed point.
Each of them had enough chips that the outcome was anything but certain, though John Juanda did everything he could to turn his status as a favorite into an EPT win. First he caught quite lucky to eliminate Bowker in third place. It took five bets to get all of Bowker’s 8.6 million chips in the middle holding pocket jacks to the pocket tens of Juanda, who at the time had his younger opponent covered by about 2 million. Bowker was a big favorite, but neither of his jacks was a club and one of Juanda’s tens was – so when the board ran out all clubs, Juanda had the higher flush and Bowker had to settle for a £300,000 payday.
With a lead of 19.6 million to 5.6 million as heads-up play began it looked as if Juanda would probably not have to work too hard to close things out and claim his first EPT title, but David Vamplew had other designs. The Scotsman, a recent graduate in mathematics at Edinburgh University, chipped nearly 2 million off Juanda’s stack before finding himself on the beneficial end of a cold deck when his J-T and Juanda’s J-2 both flopped trips. That gave Vamplew a narrow lead himself and meant there was a match on.
For four hours the two traded blows, with Juanda getting the best of Vamplew quite often in the early going. He even had his young opponent all-in with the worst of it twice, but Vamplew survived each time to keep the battle going. Eventually the Scotsman turned things around and became the one applying all the pressure. He finally locked up the win by calling with A-3 Juanda shoved pre-flop holding K-2; the flop brought Vamplew two pair and the victory. He earned £900,000 (US $1,430,910) for the EPT London win, while Juanda settled for £545,000 (US $866,496) and a jump to fifth place on the all-time money list.
