Zoltan Gal wins the record breaking €1,100 Eureka Main Event at the European Poker Tour (EPT) Festival in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
Whilst some quarters of the poker market is seeing a downswing in player numbers, one such tour that does not have that problem is the European Poker Tour (EPT) and it’s little fledgling the Eureka Poker Tour.
The recent €1,100 No Limit Hold’em (NHLE) Main Event broke all records for Eureka Main Event attendances after 1,423 players turned up to play at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, creating a total prize pool of €1,389,040.
€208,655 of that purse now resides in the bank account of the Hungarian player Zoltan Gal, who up until that point counted a $27,913 first prize at a $400 Deep Stack event in Las Vegas as his best score to date.
Gal overcome a final table that contained the American Bryan Paris who has won over $6m in online winnings, but it was Andreas Freund who made it through to the heads-up action after Paris was eliminated in fourth place for €72,230.
Gal qualified for this event playing in an online satellite and began the heads-up action with a 3:1 chip lead, but Freund would soon chip away and actually take the chip lead at numerous times in the contest before pocket eights ran into the brick wall of pocket tens to hand the title to the young Hungarian.
Other notables to cash in the event included Max Pescatori (17th), former EPT Champion Zimnan Ziyard (19th) and the Frenchman Benjamin Pollak (21st).
With such a big field turning up for the Eureka Main Event, signs are good that the EPT Main Event will also be another huge field.
Final Table Standings
1st. Zoltan Gal – €208,655
2nd. Andreas Freund – €174,655
3rd. Blazej Przygorzewski – €98,210
4th. Bryan Paris – €72,230
5th. Markus Stolger – €56,600
6th. Stavros Kalfas – €43,240
7th. Erik Scheidt – €33,090
8th. Robert Malinowski – €23,430.
