EPT Deauville High Roller Day 1: Vladimir Troyanovski Leads a Star-Studded Field
Thursday marked the start of the €10,300 PokerStars.fr European Poker Tour High Roller, a tournament that some regard as the festival’s flagship event. For their €10,300, players received 50,000 tournament chips, a superb blind structure that increased every 60 minutes and the chance to pit their wits against some of the best poker players in the business.
By the time play came to an end there were 83 unique entries and a total of 14 reloads in the pot, and with registration open until the end of the first level of Day 2, which will be at around 13:00CET, there could well be a €1,000,000 prize pool created. Fifty-one players survived Day 1.
The man who is in the best position to win the lion’s share of this huge prize pool is Vladimir Troyanovski who managed to turn his starting stack into 266,200.
Some of the other big stacks include Kevin Vandersmissen (262,000) and JC Alvarado (246,700). Team PokerStars Pros Vicky Coren (52,900) and Eugene Katchalov (90,800) also managed to navigate their way through to Day 2.
Although players were permitted to make one reload of their stack if they lost their initial stack, we will not be seeing a whole host of big names on Day 2. The likes of Roberto Romanello, PCA champion Dimitar Danchev, Dominik Nitsche and Kent Lundmark all used a single bullet and decided not to reload. Michael Tureniec, Steve O’Dwyer and Team PokerStars Pro Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier each busted out, reloaded and busted out again – an expensive day’s poker for that talented trio.
As mentioned, Day 2 starts at 12:00CET and the PokerNews Live Reporting team will be on the tournament floor bringing you all of the action from this stellar event. Until then it is goodnight from Deauville!