Friday, 29th March 2024 05:51
Home / Uncategorized / Eureka5 Prague: Samuel Sjoqvist survives slaughter, 300+ succumb

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Samuel Sjoqvist: What to do with all these chips?
 

We are two days in to a certain epic of a poker festival, and more specifically one day through the Eureka Prague main event.

This €1,000 tournament, which is the final stop on Season 5 of the Eureka Poker Tour, is among the most popular in the global calendar, and 438 players showed up today to have a first crack at it.

Despite all the riches and prestige on offer to its winner, the pace of this tournament never dips below breakneck. By the time they had whistled through 12 levels today, only around 115 players still had chips of whom Sweden’s Samuel Sjoqvist had the very most.

His 263,500 was a tiny squeak more than Voldomymyr Hancharyk’s 262,000. Ari Engel, somewhat better known than those two, had 233,800.

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Ari Engel: Good day
 

Players began with 25,000 chips, but before registration even closed, more than 40 players were out. Clinging on to chips was super difficult: Eugene Katchalov didn’t last to dinner, neither did his Team PokerStars Pro team-mate Chen Lin.

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Early bath in Chen Lin’s Eureka debut
 

Liliya Novikova of Team Online outlasted both of them, but was eliminated on the very last hand of play.

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Liliya Novikova: Last hand despair
 

In other events today, Michal Mrakes found himself on the right side of a cooler–finding aces against Jarosław Kosmaty’s kings–to put himself among the early leaders. But then Ismael Bojang found himself on the wrong side of an identical coup–he had kings to an opponent’s aces–and that worked too. He won the hand and took over the lead. Bojang finished with 227,160, one of seven players with a stack of more than 200,000. Mrakes had drifted back into the pack.

Wing Sang Lee did most of his destruction around this time, building a stack north of 150,000 before many had got above a starting stack. Lee stuck with it until the end as well, bagging 226,400 at the close.

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The prominent players at this stage, either by virtue of their stack size or their repute, are as follows:

Samuel Sjoquist – 263,500
Volodymyr Hancharyk – 262,000
Ari Engel – 233,800
Andreas Hostrup – 229,400
Ismael Bojang – 227,160
Wing Sang Lee – 226,400
Michael Vainshtain – 209,000
Andrew Chen – 194,600
Volkan Aydin 179,800
Kristof Mato – 177,700
Lukas Hrtzdo – 169,900
Niall Farrell – 169,000
Tien Nguyen – 160,000
Frederik Jensen – 129,200

Tomorrow we will welcome the Day 1B field, which is entirely likely to be around three times the size of this one.

In the meantime, why not scan through all the action in German, where Robin Scherr is your capable host on PokerStarsBlog.de. All the schedule information is on the EPT App, which is available on both Android or IOS.

The Eureka coverage is all handily organized on the Eureka Prague page.

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