“Put a towel underneath your door?”
It was an odd request.
“Why?”
“The snake.”
“What snake?”
Then he showed me the longest-arsed python I had ever seen in my life. It lived in a plastic tube and could kill me in my sleep hence the towel.
He was a strange cookie: a firefighter.
He took great delight in showing me his bedroom, and it was deathly cold. The window was wide open — the cold night air sneaking in, hiding underneath his covers.
“Why do you have the window open?”
“I am a firefighter. I need the cold.”
“But what if someone climbs through your window?”
“Oh, they won’t do that,” he said, producing a big gun.
I only stayed one night, and I haven’t thought about him until Matthias Eibinger won another high roller and a vision interrupted my thoughts of high stakes poker players placing towels beneath casino doors in an attempt to keep him out.
Matthias Eibinger Wins The €50k Super High Roller.
The €50k Super High Roller attracted 40-entrants (30 unique, and ten with a little extra cash to splash the dash), six more than 2017 when Timothy Adams took the title, €555,000 first prize and a bouquet.
It was a spiffing final table with quality players jutting out all over like decades-old gravestones in a long-forgotten cemetery — players of the ilk of the 2017 Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) Main Event winner, Charlie Carrel, one half of the mighty Greenwood twins in Luc, and a man experiencing the heater of his life, Andras Nemeth.
But before I wax lyrical about the awesome Austrian, it’s worth mentioning the mighty Moldovan. Pavel Plesuv flew into Prague after winning the World Poker Tour (WPT) Seminole Rock ‘N’ Roller Open Main Event, and then proceeded to make the final table of every high roller that EPT Prague ushered in his direction.
Nemeth, Plesuv, Greenwood and Carrel are top players, but it was Eibinger who continued his incredible 2018 with the win. The Austrian beat Nemeth in a hard-fought and fortunate heads-up match, which in truth, the Hungarian would have closed out had it not been for the Poker Gods repeatedly kicking him in the balls with Eibinger out for the count.
The victory is Eibinger’s third of the year, including taking down the $52,000 event during ARIA Fall Madness for $575,000, and a $25k at the same venue in the summer for $300,000. Eibinger also tore through the PokerStars’ EPT in Barcelona earlier this year cashing in five big buy-in events collecting $1.5m.
Here are the final table results:
Final Table Results
1. Matthias Eibinger – €653,000
2. Andras Nemeth – €451,350
3. Liang Xu – €288,090
4. Pavel Plesuv – €220,870
5. Luc Greenwood – €172,850
6. Charlie Carrel – €134,440
Thomas Boivin and Corentin Ropert Win €25k Events via Live Satellites
Sitting on the EPT Prague undercard was two €25,000 High Rollers and players who qualified for the events via live satellites won them both turning a speculative effort into a mammoth amount of money.
The first event saw 46-entrants (36 unique, ten re-entries) create the first prize of €375,520, and that money now sits in a bank account belonging to Thomas Boivin.
The Belgian defeated a final table that included the WPT Champion Pavel Plesuv, the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) €25k High Roller winner, Michael Addamo, and the high stakes regular, Orpen Kisacikoglu.
But it was the presence of Steve O’Dwyer that caught most people’s attention. O’Dwyer is one of four players (David Peters, Adrian Mateos and Justin Bonomo) capable of stopping Alex Foxen from taking down the 2018 Global Poker Index (GPI) Player of the Year (PoY) award, but the American only bagged 248.25 GPI points with 319.21 points going to the Belgian. That said it was another remarkable run for a man who has now won more than $6.4m in 2018.
It’s the third tournament win of Boivin’s career after conquering a field of 2,887-entrants in a $1,100 Mid-States Poker Tour (MSPT) DeepStack event at The Venetian for $352,153 in 2016, and battering 516-entrants in an AUD 1,200 No-Limit Hold’em Six-Max event at the 2017 Aussie Millions for $88,195. Boivin’s win sees his all-time live tournament earnings shift to $2,127,693 putting him sixth in his the Belgium rankings behind Davidi Kitai, Pierre Neuville, Kenny Hallaert, Michael Gathy and Bart Lybaert.
Here are the final table results:
Final Table Results
1. Thomas Boivin – €375,520
2. Steve O’Dwyer – €259,550
3. Orpen Kisacikoglu – €165,670
4. Michael Addamo – €127,010
5. Pavel Plesuv – €99,400
6. Stefan Huber – €77,310
Corentin Ropert told reporters that his EPT Prague experience was so awful he considered spending the night in his room watching movies on Netflix. Instead, inspired by Boivin’s victory, the Frenchman dragged his sorry arse to the poker room to compete in a live satellite for the €25k and ended up winning the lot.
The field size was slightly smaller than the first €25k with 34-entrants (29 unique, five re-entries) carving out a €277,560 first prize, and Ropert beat the Japanese player Tsugunari Toma, heads-up, to take the title.
It’s the second victory of Ropert’s career, and they have come in the last two events the Frenchman has finished in the money (in October he beat 149-entrants in a €1k event in Divonne Les Bains to take the €30,336 first prize). This win was more than double his combined efforts of the previous five years.
Michael Addamo made his second EPT Prague final table, Plesuv made his third, and there was also an appearance from the high rolling Russian born Dietrich Fast.
Final Table Results
1. Corentin Ropert – €277,560
2. Tsugunary Toma – €191,840
3. Michael Addamo – €122,450
4. Dietrich Fast – €93,880
5. Norbert Szecsi – €73,470
6. Pavel Plesuv – €57,140