Poker News

Nic Szeremeta

Since it was started in the mid 90s, the Concord Card Casino’s mini version of the World Series championship event has never really fulfilled its potential. The biggest field was four years ago when 136 hopefuls had a shot at the no limit hold’em affair run to the same time table and blind structure as the Las Vegas biggie.

This year, though, everything changed. The Concord was mobbed by players from 30 countries. PokerStars.com sent a massive party of players as it was one of the featured events in the new televised European Poker Tour which it is sponsoring. As a result there were many relatively unknown Americans joining the many new faces on the European scene. There was even a stray Aussie who had made the 25,000 mile round trip from Sydney.

The 20-yard queue for the pre-event super satellite stretched to the door of the card room and the field of 165-plus alternates-produced enough cash to hand out 26 seats. The organizers had anticipated a field of around 250 with a winner’s purse of EURO 150,000 but when the cards went in the air 297 players took their seats for a shot at a first prize of over EURO 180,000-not bad for a EURO 2,000 investment. This was more than double the previous record. Inevitably there were side effects. The problem of finding enough space to feed the players was solved by erecting a marquee restaurant in the car park. There was no solution to the queues for the bathrooms during the 10 minute breaks. The most unfortunate result of the big turn out was that the time levels had to be reduced to 75 minutes from the normal two hours so the original concept of the tournament-to give players a taste of WSOP championship conditions-was lost.

And the first day’s play was punishing for those who survived it. Nine levels were played starting at just after 2pm and it was not until 3 am the following day that the remaining 83 players could head off for their beds with a restart just nine hours later. Day two was another post midnight marathon to reach the TV stage of the competition.

The final table of eight comprised seven relative unknowns and one well known face on the European scene. Parisian pharmacist Pascal Perrault stood second in chips with 641,000 of the near 3 million in play. Ahead of him was chip leader Andreas Harnemo, a 31-year-old Swede who mainly plays online. He held 821,000 chips. The rest of the line-up included two Americans, Tim Ramsey and Josh Schiffman, a 20 year old philosophy student at Duke University. Both were PokerStars qualifiers. Two English players, Simon Nowab and David Clayton, had also made it through-both of whom had learned the game at the northern seaside resort of Blackpool. Completing the line-up were two former dealers Mika Puro from Finland and Joachim Sanejstra. Joachim was at home having learnt his dealing trade at the CCC.

Pascal who over the past few years had made more final tables in major European events than the rest of the field combined certainly had the edge in experience. Not only that, he had a massive edge in luck also. One the second day he had moved up the leader board with a run of cards which were the stuff of dreams for the holders and nightmares for the opponents.

Example-9-9 for Pascal against 10-10 all in for previous EPT winner Noah Boeken-9 on the flop. Pascal K-Q suited versus pocket kings all in. No problem Q-Q on the board and another one bites the dust. (For a hilarious account of the poker fairy’s non-stop visits to the Frenchman go to Brad Willis’s superb report on www.EPTblog.com).

Suffice it to say that had previous resident of Vienna, Strauss, been around, he would have written an operetta about it, or at least a tune- the Beautiful Outdraw Polka or similar. But it would be most unfair to put Pascal’s win at the final down to luck rather than experience. It may have been good fortune which helped him to get there but when he arrived he knew what to do.

Fittingly the two big chip leaders survived to get heads up and then did a partial deal over the EURO 280,000 for winner and runner up.Pascal went on to take the title and the pair of them headed off to Monte Carlo for the Grand Final of the EPT a few days later.

Nic Szeremeta is managing editor of Poker Europa magazine, the monthly news and views publication from the Euro side of the pond. To subscribe ( EURO 55 / $70) go to www.PokerInEurope.com

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