EPT London Round-Up

The world’s finest players have been making London their home over the past month with first the WSOPE & then the EPT rolling into town – and neither disappointed.
The Vic played host to some of the biggest buy-in tournaments anywhere last week and the stars rolled out to compete for their share of the millions of pounds in prize money.

EPT £5,200 Main Event

First off was the £5,200 Main Event, which saw 596 runners (234 from PokerStars) create a prize pool of a cool £3,349,200, only fractionally short of the WSOPE ME coffin. A larger first prize of £1million was taken down by American Michael Martin, who at one stage was down to just 95,000 in chips at the final table before rallying to come out on top.
Martin, from Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, continued his good form this year after final tabling the EPT Monte Carlo Grand Final in April (coming 5th for $666,171). The Pennsylvania State University graduate (with a degree in American Studies) now has over $3.2 in live tournament winnings and said of his win: “It has been surreal. I had less than two big blinds and then, just three hands later, I was on 1.4 million. But I just knew I was going to do something here and
having my family watching made me even more determined.”

Among those that he knocked out were Full Tilt pro & Card Runners coach Eric Liu (4th, $430,162), who said in his blog: “Definitely one of the best tournament players in the world, Michael has 2 EPT final tables under his belt with this being the 3rd. He definitely deserves the win, as he is a great player. 3rd time's the charm ;)”.

Other notable players to go deep include Stars pro Johannes Strassmann (7th, $221,056), David Benyamine (12th, $65,720), Max Pesctaori (15th, $35,846) & November Niner (bet they hate being called that by now) Peter Eastgate, who came in 18th for $29,871.

PokerStars £20,000 High Roller Event

Big boys only, this one – just 86 players coughed up the enormous entry fee but they still managed to create a prize pool of over £1.7million.
The eventual winner was none other than Jason Mericer, who is arguably the world’s hottest tournament player at present. In the last 6 months alone Mercier has won over $2.7million just from live tournaments! In April he took down the EPT San Remo for $1,372,893 before final tabling the Barcelona leg earlier this month (6th, $324,946). Just two weeks later he made another final table at the WSOPE £5,000 PLO event (8th, $48,763) before this monster cash of $944,847.
In the process of doing so he denied John Juanda a second major title in just four days; he made it through to heads-up play only to see his AJ defeated by Mericer’s KQ in the final hand to pocket a further $598,770 and take him to 9th in the all-time tournament money list.
As you would expect, the final table was littered with pokers best and brightest, with the likes of Peter ‘Apathy123’ Jetten (4th, $346,078), Scotty Nguyen (5th, $251,776), David Benyamine (8th, $126,346) & Isabelle Mercier (9th, $94,302) all cashing in a tournament which may prove to be a fixture across the EPT calendar.

Next stop on the EPT tour is the Budapest leg, starting on October 28th. You can qualify for it now only on PokerStars; given the amount Michael Martin received for his victory, we would advise you to take your shot asap.