It’s not immediately obvious whether the players sitting in seats eight and nine of table 15 today know who each other is. There’s certainly not a great deal of chat going on between the two of them and there’s no evidence that they’re friends or anything. But Laurence Houghton and Sami Kelopuro, for it is they, are likely to know one another’s names if someone told them. Or, rather, they would be aware of their online monikers. Houghton is better known as “rivermanl”, an online tournament specialist from the United Kingdom, who is regularly found at the top of database leaderboards measuring the biggest online winners; Kelopuro goes by the name “LarsLuzak” online, a regular of the nosebleed cash games and one of the most feared and fearless players to be found in the game.
Neither has a great deal of pedigree on the EPT to date. Indeed, a scan of the database reveals zeros cashes between them in these environs. But neither of them has played a huge number of the events either but are beginning to make their appearances more regular, which can only mean some serious cashes are around the corner. Here, they might end up cancelling each other out, but it’ll be a battle well worth watching.
Other intriguing match-ups today include the positioning of the Team PokerStars Pro Marcin Horecki on the same table as the World Cup winner Malte Strothmann. Also Bill Chen and Alex Kravchenko have only a dealer between then on table 40. The young Americans Steven Silverman and Alex Fitzgerald both have form on the Latin America Poker Tour, but are now more commonly to be found at the EPTs. Both of them have found their way to the same table.
And how about “table shortstack”? In the first eight seats of table 33 are players returning with stacks of 9,600, 6,600, 6,300, 3,900, 12,100, 10,800, 11,900, and 15,200, a table average less than what they started with on day one. The nine and ten seats on that table are occupied by David Lacoste and Mats Johansson, who surely cannot believe their luck that their stacks of 43,500 and 37,700 are gargantuan.
Prepare for a refrain of “Seat open! Table 33!”
Here’s how the video blog team see the start of day two:
Watch EPT San Remo S5: Introduction into Day 2 on PokerStars.tv
