Posts Tagged ‘united kingdom’
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.
Day 2 Underway at EPT London Main Event
October 1st, 2010
English soccer great Tony Cascarino is among the chip leaders at EPT London.
After two days of the biggest poker tournament the United Kingdom has ever seen it’s officially time to begin playing down toward a final table (and a champion) at the EPT London Main Event.
Italy’s Claudio Cecchi ended yesterday’s Day 1B with the chip lead, his 237,500-chip stack giving him the advantage over the entire field from both starting days. Not too far behind him yesterday was English soccer legend Tony Cascarino, who finished the day with 181,400. No stranger to poker tournaments, Cascarino will be looking to use EPT London to improve on his biggest score, a $283,412 win in the 2009 Grosvenor UK Poker Tour Grand Final.
Among the other healthy stacks when play resumed today were David Steicke, Phil Ivey, Barry Shulman, Daniel Negreanu, Arnaud Mattern, J.P. Kelly, Greg Raymer, Theo Jorgenson, Sam Stein, Tom Marchese, Jake Cody, Sam Trickett and another English soccer legend, Teddy Sheringham. Sheringham is looking to make his second consecutive EPT final table after finishing in fifth place at EPT Vilamoura in August.
The Day 2 field has already been reduced to some 260 players. Among the casualties today are Jeffrey Lisandro, Freddy Deeb, Tony Cousineau and tennis great Boris Becker. You can get live updates on today’s EPT London action from the hard-working folks at PokerNews.
World Poker Tour Makes First Stop in London Today
August 30th, 2010
The WPT is finally making its first stop in London today.
After years of bypassing one of the oldest poker markets in the world, the World Poker Tour is finally landing in the United Kingdom today – and its £5,000 Championship Event is just the first of more than a dozen major tournaments to be held in the UK capital throughout September.
The WPT London Championship Event began the first of two starting flights today at noon local time and there were plenty of familiar faces in the field. Phil Ivey, James Akenhead, Praz Bansi, Luke “FullFlush” Schwartz, Erik Seidel, Huck Seed, Andrew Robl and Tony G all turned up for the first day of play at the Mayfair Palm Beach Casino. Even the tournament director – the Bellagio’s Jack McClelland – made the tournament feel more like a gathering of old friends than a new stop on the WPT.
Tomorrow will see a second starting flight before the field combines and begins playing down to Saturday’s final table. There will also be a high rollers tournament with a £15,000 buy-in beginning on Friday that should draw some of the biggest names in the game. London won’t be through with poker when the World Poker Tour stop finishes up, though. WSOP Europe will begin on September 14th at the Casino at the Empire in the English capital and run five bracelets events through the end of the month, and the EPT will kick off a full schedule of events in London on September 28.
How Many WSOP Bracelets Will British Poker Players Win In 2010?
June 25th, 2010
Richard Ashby and his fellow British poker players are lighting up the WSOP in 2010. (Photo: Rob Gracie)
Last night Steve Jellinek took down the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo event at the World Series of Poker, defeating a final table lineup that included Phil Hellmuth and outlasting John Gottlieb in the heads-up match to grab $245,871 and his first career gold bracelet. With Jellinek’s win, the United Kingdom now has a total of five bracelets at this year’s WSOP, the most of any nation outside of the United States. In chronological order, the other four British bracelet winners are Praz Bansi, James Dempsey, Richard Ashby and Mike Ellis.
How many more bracelets could British poker players win before the end of the 2010 WSOP? There’s at least one strong possibility at the moment, with Richard Ashby still holding a sizable stack with 17 players remaining in the $10,000 HORSE tournament. But putting aside for the moment the possibility of Ashby or one of the others who have already won a bracelet repeating that feat, there are a number of players who have it in them to win a WSOP event.
“Sensei” Neil Channing has managed four cashes, including a second-place finish in Event #6, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout. Former pro soccer player Sam Trickett also has four cashes with a runner-up spot in the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em event. Veteran Chris Bjorin, who calls London home, has cashed five times this WSOP, including a final-table finish in the $2,500 Razz event. And of course, there are the dozens of other British pros entering events at the WSOP, any one of whom could make a run at a bracelet.
Looking down the road at the rest of the WSOP schedule, there are eight more no-limit hold’em preliminary events, one more limit hold’em event, three more pot-limit Omaha events, and the Main Event remaining here in Vegas, and then the five-event schedule at WSOP Europe in September. NLHE and PLO have been some of the strengths of British poker players at the WSOP both this year and in the past, so they have to be given a solid chance of winning at least one more bracelet before the WSOP concludes for 2010. If it doesn’t happen, no one will be surprised – but if it does, it will be one more piece of evidence for the argument that the UK is one of the world’s most consistent producers of top-level poker players.
WSOP: Canada’s Miguel Proulx Wins $2,500 Pot-Limit Omaha
June 18th, 2010
Miguel Proulx outlasted a marathon PLO table for his first bracelet win. (Photo: WSOP)
Despite its reputation as an action game, Pot-Limit Omaha can take a long time to play out, especially with a bracelet on the line. Today’s tournament day was classic PLO in that regard, taking twelve hours to play down from 12 players to one. There were more nationalities represented than usual at this final table, with players from five different countries – Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States – all taking to the felt in search of their first WSOP bracelet.
Michael Greco, a British actor best known for his 330-episode run as Beppe di Marco in the television series EastEnders, was one of the reasons the eliminations didn’t get started sooner. Greco looked like he might be the first to go after coming in with the shortest stack. But after hitting a straight draw against Joerg Engels and then having his pair of aces hold up against Patrick Hanoteau’s straight draw, Greco would cruise for some time. Hanoteau, meanwhile, would be the only player to leave before the dinner break, exiting in ninth place ($25,044).
Greco would actually progress all the way until play was three-handed, when he got all his chip in the middle on the heavy side of a coin flip against L.J. Klein but got outflopped. His third-place finish was good for $129,691 and matched his career-best WSOP finish from one of last year’s $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em events.
Klein had better than a 2-to-1 lead when heads-up play began and he continually applied pressure in an attempt to end things early. He appeared to have the bracelet locked up when he flopped a set of fours, but his opponent, Miguel Proulx, spiked a queen on the river for a set of his own and nearly evened things up. About 15 minutes later Klein would flop top two pair on the same board that gave Proulx the nut flush, and all the chips went in the middle; without the board pairing Klein was eliminated and Proulx became the third player from Canada to win a WSOP bracelet in 2010.
Proulx’s second career WSOP cash was worth $315,311, easily the biggest of his career. Klein, meanwhile, settled for a consolation prize of $195,147.
Voting for WSOP Tournament of Champions Ends Tomorrow
June 14th, 2010
Annette Obrestad is hoping to get enough votes to play in the TOC.
When the World Series of Poker decided to resurrect the Tournament of Champions after a four-year layoff, the twist to get the public’s attention was that most of the table lineup would be determined by their votes. Now the deadline for having a say in the process is drawing near, so if you have a favorite eligible player it’s time to do your part in getting them into this one-of-a-kind $1,000,000 freeroll.
Seven of the 27 seats in the tournament are already locked up. The winners of past incarnations of the Tournament of Champions – Annie Duke, Mike Matusow and Mike Sexton – are all guaranteed spots in the tournament. The two reigning champions from the biggest WSOP tournaments of 2009 – Main Event champion Joe Cada and WSOP Europe Main Event winner Barry Shulman – also have their seats locked up. Top poker pro Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier won a special sit-and-go for non-bracelet winners to earn his seat, and 33-year-old Andrew Barton of the United Kingdom won his seat in an online competition.
The other 20 seats are still up for grabs, though. Top players like Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Annette Obrestad, Joe Hachem, and Scotty Nguyen are among the top 50 vote-getters at the moment, as are some more surprising former bracelet winners like Alexander Kravchenko, Peter Smurfit, Eli Elezra and David Sklansky.
Voting for the 2010 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions is open through 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow night, June 15th. You can reach the ballot by going to the Tournament of Champions website. The final, official list of WSOP TOC participants is expected to be announced on June 17th.
WSOP: Richard Ashby Becomes Third UK Bracelet Winner of 2010
June 13th, 2010
Richard Ashby (left) hung tough to capture his first bracelet, and England’s third of the 2010 WSOP. (Photo: WSOP)
We’re less than halfway through the schedule, but it’s already been a good year for British poker pros at the World Series of Poker. Praz Bansi set the tone when he won his second career bracelet in Event #5, and James Dempsey made the United Kingdom the winningest country next to the United States at this year’s WSOP when he took down Event #9. Now the UK has its third bracelet winner of 2010: high stakes cash game player Richard Ashby, champion of Event #21, $1,500 Seven-Card Stud.
Ashby faced a tough, experienced lineup on the final day of the tournament. Incoming chip leader Sorel Mizzi has been one of the hottest tournament players in poker this year. Former bracelet winner Dan Heimiller had already made two previous final tables during this WSOP. And online pros Pat Pezzin and Jon Turner were both appearing at their fourth career WSOP final tables.
Despite never being in the lead, Ashby managed to outlast all of them by keeping himself in the game while they took each other out. Only once he found himself heads-up with Christine Pietsch was he able to claim the chip lead. And once he had jumped ahead, it seemed like he always had a hand just slightly better than Pietsch’s, including on the last hand when he had a buried pair of queens to best her pair of tens.
Pietsch’s second-place finish is the highest by a woman yet at this year’s WSOP, and it earned her $86,756. Richard Ashby, meanwhile, walked away with his first WSOP bracelet in just his second final table appearance, as well as the winner’s purse of $140,467.
A footnote to Event #21: the 14th-place finisher was Steve Albini, a musician and producer/audio engineer known for his work with dozens of rock bands including The Pixies, Nirvana, Cheap Trick, and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. Albini, who is known to post at the 2+2 forums from time to time under the name “electrical,” took home $6,356.
Nottingham Hosts UK’s Second-Biggest Poker Tournament
May 14th, 2010
Dusk Till Dawn is the host of one of the UK’s biggest tourneys.
The United Kingdom is in the middle of something of a tournament poker boom. Last year’s EPT London event saw the largest field in the country’s history when 730 players from around the world put up £5,000 each for a shot at a European Poker Tour title. Now an event with a much smaller buy-in, the £560 UK & Ireland Poker Tour main event in Nottingham, has drawn the second-largest field of any poker tournament ever held in the UK.
The tournament sported a £100,000 guaranteed prize pool, meaning that organizers needed 200 players to turn up to meet the guarantee. But as is often the case with such tournaments, the field far exceeded the guarantee; over the course of its two starting days the UKIPT event in Nottingham drew 650 players, building a £325,000 prize pool with a first-place prize of £80,000. The winner won’t be determined until next Monday, when the final table is scheduled to play out.
Holding such a big poker tournament is something of a moral victory for the management team at Dusk Till Dawn, the 45-table poker room in Nottingham that first opened its doors in 2007 after a lengthy court battle with three casino companies who wanted to keep the club from ever coming to fruition. Those companies cited insufficient demand as the reason for their opposition to the club opening – and now, three years down the road, the demand for poker in Nottingham has been stated very loudly and very clearly for the record.
EPT Extends San Remo Registration Due to Iceland Volcano
April 16th, 2010
This volcano is even affecting poker tournaments. (Photo: Halldor Kolbeins)
For most of its tournaments, the European Poker Tour closes registration after the second level of play on Day 1B. For the 2010 EPT San Remo, going on right now in Italy, that policy has been loosened a bit thanks to some interference from Mother Nature.
The Eyjafjallajökull volcano on the northern Atlantic island of Iceland first began erupting several weeks ago, partially melting a glacier and causing flooding on the island. Now the volcano has begun to erupt again, caused major disruptions to air travel all across Europe and the North Atlantic as the United Kingdom decided to order its airspace closed due to the giant ash cloud emanating from Iceland.
Normally travel from London to San Remo would only take a few hours, but without flights available there were lots of players who had to take more arduous routes to make it to the poker tables in Italy. As a result, the EPT brass decided to extend registration on today’s Day 1B by an extra two levels. That allowed time for Jason Mercier, Barry Greenstein and Peter Eastgate time to arrive from the UK via minibus. Meanwhile Marc Goodwin, Tony Cascarino and Michael Greco had to take a combination of private cars and overcrowded trains but still arrived in time to play the tournament.
The final registration count at San Remo will probably fall short of last year’s record field of 1,178 thanks to today’s travel woes. But with 585 registrants on Day 1A and several hundred more today there should still be a healthy first-place prize on hand for the player who outlasts the both the volcano and rest of his fellow rounders.
