Thursday, 28th March 2024 18:11
Home / Uncategorized / EPT12 Barcelona: Chasing Urbanovich (again); Season 12 POY race underway

With a new European Poker Tour season comes a new EPT Player of the Year race — three of them, in fact, as the EPT will again be employing its three-tiered Platinum-Gold-Silver method of determing POYs, with points calculated using the Global Poker Index’s formula.

Earlier this week we were watching Poland’s Dzmitry Urbanovich collect not one but two POY trophies for having earned the honors as both the Platinum and Gold POYs, with France’s Jean-Jacques Zeitoun earning the Silver.

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Urbanovich and Zeitoun receiving the hardware
The “Platinum” is the biggie, including all EPT events. “Gold” covers events with buy-ins worth $3K USD and lower, while “Silver” is for those events with buy-ins of worth $600 or less.

With just a day to go in the first festival of Season 12, we thought it as good a time as any to take a look at how this year’s races are shaping up. We had to do a double take, just to be sure we weren’t looking at last season’s totals.

That’s because Urbanovich is back in first position already, on the strength of three final tables, including runner-up finishes in both the €50K High Roller (Event #19) and the €5K PLO (Event #41).

Here a look at the top 10 of the EPT12 Player of the Year leaderboard (Platinum) heading into today’s play:

Pos. Player Country Points
1 Dzmitry Urbanovich Poland 968.74
2 Mike McDonald Canada 921.91
3 Martin Finger Germany 810.92
4 Jussi Nevanlinna Finland 676.36
5 Kasra Pour Khomamy Germany 613.03
6 Jani Sointula Finland 609.69
7 Steve O’Dwyer Ireland 573.29
8 Niklas Astedt Sweden 566.44
9 Dietrich Fast Germany 555.14
10 Eric Rabl Switzerland 549.91

Mike McDonald has had three cashes at the festival, including final-tabling the €25K High Roller (Event #36) where he finished fifth. That’s the event won by Martin Finger, who also took sixth in another €5K NL (Event #54). Jussi Nevanlinna sits in fourth position at present on the strength of three cashes including a runner-up in that same €5K NL.

Kasra Pour Khomamy has managed a second, a third, and a fourth in different NL side events thus far, enough to put him in fifth just ahead of €25K High Roller fourth-place finisher Jani Sointula. Steve O’Dwyer cashed in two High Rollers — the €50K and €25K — to join the top ten.

Three cashes and a final table puts Niklas Astedt in eighth position, a couple of cashes have helped Dietrich Fast into ninth, and four cashes and two final tables put Eric Rabl in 10th.

Kasra Pour Khomamy tops the Gold POY race at present, with Eric Rabl in second. Meanwhile €200 NL Turbo (Event #45 winner) Marek Grzeska of Poland leads the Silver.

There are big points still to be won here in Barcelona, and the rest of the season to go. But the new year has begun as the previous one concluded, with everyone chasing Urbanovich.

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Dzmitry Urbanovich
To get all the latest news, chip counts and payouts from EPT12 Barcelona, don’t forget to download the EPT App on both Android or IOS.

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Martin Harris is Freelance Contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

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