EPT11 Grand Final Main Event Down to 34

One of the biggest poker events of the year, PokerStars and Monte-Carlo Casino EPT Grand Final Main Event, is entering its final stages. What started as a 564-players affair has been reduced to competition of 34 sturdiest, luckiest and most persistent players.

Led by the Pole Jose Carlos Garcia these 34 will be taking their seats in Monte Carlo Casino shortly to continue their EPT adventure. The plan is to play down to final two tables, so it could be a short day today, but then again, there are never any guarantees.

Garcia, who bagged 1.7 million at the end of play last night, is well ahead of the rest of the field. His closest competitor is Connor Drinan, sitting on the stack of 1,065,000. Drinan has been recording some nice results lately and the EPT title would certainly fit nicely in his resume, but overcoming a player who shares his house with the menace that is Dzmitry Urbanovich could prove to be a challenging task.

Although these two are the only ones with over a million chips in their stacks, the rest of the field will certainly make it a walk in the park for them. Scott Clements, Dario Sammartino, Ole Schemion, Johnny Lodden and Andre Akkari are all in top ten, which really says a lot about the quality of the event.

Trailing top ten, but still in with a shot are also Jason mercier, Ludovic Geilich, Juan Martin Pastor and Stephen Chidwick. Bottom three spots on the leaderboard are occupied by three more well known names: Felix Stephensen, Isaac Haxton and Fabrice Soulier. All in all, there will be no lack of action in the room today.

But enough about the lucky ones. There were 80 players in the room yesterday who will not be coming back today. Their EPT dreams crushed, their hopes shattered. The man who perhaps felt the sting of the elimination the most was one Eric Sfez, whose pocket Kings were cracked by Mercier's Deuces, sending him to the rail as the unlucky bubble boy.

After that, others soon followed the suit, as Steve O'Dwyer went to the cashier to pick up his min-cash, followed by Daniel Smith, Maria Ho, Eugene Katchalov, Dimitar Danchev and, eventually, Filippo Gandini, who was yesterday's last victim.

There are no bubbles today. There are a couple of pay jumps, but of the players left, not too many will be particularly worried about adding those extra few thousands to their roll. Instead, adding more chips to the respective stacks will be paramount, as there is €1,082,000 waiting for the winner.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Photo: Neil Stoddart, PokerStars Blog