The Montreal Nationals beat The Berlin Bears to become the first winners of the Global Poker League and win the $100,000 first prize.
I used to dream of playing poker. Rivers would hit me in the gut as I dribbled onto my pillowcase. I would jolt upright in the darkness when another flush draw failed to hit.
Football had been my one true love for 30-years of my life. I never thought anything could ever match the beautiful game when it came to the way it made me feel, and then I started having those dreams.
I would never have enjoyed poker without the ability to win or lose money, though. Money is the haemoglobin that keeps you stuck to the game. Without it, you are free to float away into the arms of another.
And this is why Alex Dreyfus and everyone involved in the creation of the Global Poker League (GPL) deserves to walk through our collective guard of honour. They have managed to captivate the hearts and minds of our community and money had nothing to do with it.
Montreal Nationals Win Season 1 of the GPL
When the GPL Draft was complete, way back in February, there were two standout teams for me. The London Royals looked a competitive outfit in the Eurasia Conference, and the Montreal Nationals looked every bit as spine crushing in the Americas Conference.
Both sides made it through to the Las Vegas Playoffs as did the Moscow Wolverines, Hong Kong Stars, Berlin Bears, LA Sunset, Sao Paulo Mets and San Francisco Rush.
The London Royals – who scraped through the group stages – received a spanking from the Eurasia group winners Moscow Wolverines 4-1 in the first round. The Wolverines would face the Berlin Bears in the semi finals after the Bears beat Hong Kong 4-2. Every single game in the best of seven was used in that semi-final as Brian Rast defeated Anatoly Filatov to send the Berlin Bears into the final with a 4-3 victory.
In the Americas Conference, Montreal booked their passage into the semi-finals after beating San Francisco Rush by 4-3 in a tense matchup that went all the way. LA Sunset would be their semi-final opponents after defeating the Sao Paulo Mets in another equally thrilling 4-3 encounter. Montreal would go on to beat LA Sunset 4-2 to make their way to the final.
Montreal Nationals Versus The Berlin Bears
Sorel Mizzi gave the Bears the early lead with a victory over Mike McDonald. Pascal Lefrancois levelled things with a win over Bill Perkins, and they quickly raced into a 3-1 lead after Jason Lavelle beat Brian Rast, and Mike McDonald handed out a second defeat to the multi-millionaire investor, Perkins.
Rast pulled the score back to 2-3 with a win over Lavallee. Lefrancois extended the lead to 4-2 with a win over Mizzi, but Perkins racked up his first win of the final with a revenge win against McDonald to pull it back to 3-4.
Lavallee beat Rast to make it 5-3 – and to put them within touching distance of the trophy – only for Mizzi to lead the comeback beating both Lefrancois and McDonald in consecutive matches to send the final into a last man standing
encounter between Brian Rast and Pascal Lefrancois. The Montreal man came out victorious after flopping a top set of queens. Rast turned two pairs on the turn, holding T8, and that was the end of that – the Montreal Nationals secured their place in GPL Wikipedia history.
What Next For The GPL?
There was only one metric for success during Season 1 and that was completing Season 1. No sooner had the season concluded, Dreyfus was lauding praise on the players for ‘turning the league into a reality,’ saying they ‘took a serious leap of faith,’ for a project he called ‘crazy.’
The second season will be the defining one. It will be the year that makes or breaks this league and along with it the heart of an entrepreneur desperate to show the world how enthralling poker can be.
With PokerStars on board and the narrative of the first season acting as the wind in the GPL sails I can see next year becoming even better. Fan interaction is essential, and it is good to hear Dreyfus talking about involving them more in the second draft and the format of Season 2.
I also like his idea of reducing the length of the season to create more intensity and ‘keep hype at a maximum.’ Nine months is a long time to maintain, not only the fans interest but the players.
Dreyfus has promised that the games will have higher stakes, and the league will expand geographically, with GPL China already confirmed as a standalone project looking to tap into the potentially lucrative market.
Most of all the GPL gave the greatest players in the world a platform to showcase their talents. It’s the reason that money wasn’t a factor in the first season. It was all about the essence of competition and Montreal’s Mike McDonald captured the essence of that perfectly in the following statement:
“If [the rest of the Nationals] were watching Pascal {Lefrancois} at a final table playing for ten times these stakes we’d just be sitting there having a good time. Here we were both nervous. We were on the edge of our seats. This really made it about the poker rather than about the money, and I think that’s what the goal of sportifying poker was – is to remind you of right when you were just starting out in Poker, and I think the GPL has accomplished that.”
