Live tournament news updates as Jean-Robert Bellande leads the final 21 players at the World Poker Tour (WPT) Doyle Brunson Five Diamond Classic; the Dutchman Rens Feenstra wins the Unibet Open in Riga, and the Eureka Poker Tour in Prague sets all kinds of attendance records.
The WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond Classic has moved into the fifth day of action and it’s the oft-used poker punching bag Jean-Robert Bellande who leads the final 21 players with around 1.6m chips.
The $10,300 Main Event attracted 449 of some of the world’s greatest players and that means there is a seven figure score waiting at the apex of this prestigious event – $1,161,135 to be exact.
59 players started Day 4 and after a full day’s play over half of those had been cast aside with undue fuss. WPT Champions Club members Antonio Esfandiari, Kevin Eyster and Paul Klann, being followed to the rail by the likes of Cliff Josephy, Bryn Kenney and Jonathan Aguiar.
45 players were guaranteed to receive a $21,700 pay day and it was the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Showdown winner that suffered the ignominy of a 46th place finish under cruel circumstances. Kevin Eyster getting it in with pocket kings – well ahead of the pocket jacks of Steve Silverman – only for a third jack to roll out of the deck on the river to give Eyster the label nobody ever wants.
Notables who were a tad luckier than Eyster, but not as lucky as Bellande, included: Galen Hall (43rd), Mike Sexton (42nd), Jeff Madsen (39th), Sorel Mizzi (34th), Mohsin Charania (33rd), Brian Rast (32nd), Scotty Nguyen (29th), John Hennigan (25th) and Ravi Raghavan (23rd).
Players who will vying with Bellande for that top spot include Will Failla (354,000), Dan Smith (528,000), Dan O’Brien (643,000), Steve Silverman (667,000), Joe Serock (949,000), Christian Harder (980,000), Eddy Sabat (1,026,000) and Keith Tilson (1,274,000).
Day 5 will see the field condense to a final table of just six players.
Rens Feenstra Wins Unibet Open Riga
It might not be as prestigious as the big three, but anyone who has played in an Unibet Open event can testify to a well run tournament where every one of the players is the central focus of the tour.
The latest installment of this wonderful series has seen the Dutchman Rens Feenstra maintain his wonderful run of good form by adding the Unibet Open Riga title to the six figure score he banked after taking the top prize in a €1,500 re-entry event at the Masters Classic in Amsterdam just a few weeks ago.
Feenstra defeated Rick Jansen in heads-up action to take the first prize of $103,084 in an event that saw 208 players head to Latvia to participate in the final live event of the year, after stops at Copenhagen, Troia and Cannes.
The Prague Poker Festival Gets Underway
If you are a poker player then the Prague Poker Festival is the only place to be during the build up to Christmas.
The event has kicked off with the PokerStars sponsored Eureka Poker Tour and it has drawn an impressive 1,315 players to it’s tables, from 58 different countries, over the first two starting flights. The event is the biggest in the Eureka Poker’s history, bigger than all of the S3 Eureka tours combined, and the biggest field that the city of Prague has ever witnessed.
The field consisted of a wide array of amateurs, professionals and no fewer than 12 former EPT champions that including former EPT Prague winners Salvatore Bonavena (EPT5) and Martin Finger (EPT8).
When Day 2 commences the overall leader will be Sweden’s Erik Soderholm who bagged and tagged 264,400 chips. Marcin Horecki is not far behind with 237,300 chips and the Serbian folk singer Dragana ‘Jana’ Todorovic squeezed into the top 10 with 174,600 chips.
Around 400 players remain in the event with Day 2 just on the horizon.
