Final Eight of EPT Deauville High Roller Determined
Lebanese player Albert Daher is chip leader for the final of the record-breaking EPT Deauville €10k High Roller. Daher has 1,300,000, nearly twice as much as his nearest rival – EPT Barcelona champion Martin Schleich from Germany, who is in second place with 762,000. EPT8 Player of the Year Ondrej Vinklarek from the Czech Republic lies in third with 737,000.
There were a total of 115 entries in to the event creating a €1,104,000 prize pool with 17 players paid. Also still in: PCA champion Dominik Panka, EPT Berlin winner Davidi Kitai, EPT Barcelona champ Kent Lundmark and Estrellas Poker Tour Madrid champion Adrian Mateos Diaz who won two trophies at the GPI European Poker Awards on Wednesday: Spanish Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year.
The final eight are: Albert Daher, Lebanon, 1,300,000 Martin Schleich, Germany, 762,000 Ondrej Vinklarek, Czech Republic, 737,000 Davidi Kitai, Belgium, 733,000 Dominik Pańka, Poland, 672,000 Kent Lundmark, Sweden, 665,000 Nikolay Losev, Russia, 523,000 Adrian Mateos Diaz, Spain, 363,000
You can read a full report here:
EPT DEAUVILLE FINAL TABLE PLAYER PROFILE NOTES
Seat 1: Martin Schleich, 31, Munich, Germany When German player Martin Schleich won EPT Barcelona in Season 8, he was something of a mystery. At the time he was working part-time in customer service and not a regular on the circuit. Howover even after his massive €850,000 victory, he remained a mystery. Thanks to his reticence in interviews, it was pretty hard to gauge how much impact the win – which was only the fourth in his live tournament career – had had on him.
Since then, Schleich has attended quite a few EPTs but his best result since has been was 22nd in a PCA $2k side event for $6,410. Schleich started playing poker online with No Limit cash games in 2006 and later decided to play more tournament poker, both live and online. His poker expertise is demonstrated by the fact that, in cash games, he reached the highest ranking achievable in a big German online poker school. Other cashes, all on the EPT, include 81st EPT5 San Remo for €9,200 and two PCA side events.
Seat 2: Nikolay Losev, 33, Moscow, Russia Nikolay Losev is a poker player from Moscow in Russia with over $750,000 in live tournament winnings. Surprisingly, wherever Losev finishes tomorrow on the final table, this will be his first major cash in over two and a half years.
Losev is no stranger to winning in Deauville though. He won the €1,500 event here back in Season 6. Losev also finished tenth in the Main Event at EPT Prague in Season 7. Losev's biggest cash is currently a 28th place finish in the WSOP main event back in 2008 for $193,000 – he'll need to finish in the top two here to beat that result.
Seat 3: Davidi Kitai, Belgium Belgian pro Davidi Kitai hails from Brussels and was on his second EPT final table when he beat Andrew Chen heads-up to take down EPT Berlin in Season 8 for €712,000. His other EPT final was third at EPT Barcelona in Season 5 for €455,000 – the event won by Sebastian Ruthenberg. Kitai is the only Belgian who has won both a WSOP bracelet and a WPT title, and his EPT victory in Berlin gained him poker’s elusive “Triple Crown”.
His lifetime tournament winnings already total more than $3.4 million including his victory in the 2013 WSOP $5k PLO event for $224,560 and three other WSOP cashes last summer. His first WSOP bracelet came in 2008 when he won a €2k Pot Limit Hold’em tourney and he also has a WSOP-E bracelet from his victory in the $5k NL event in Cannes in 2012. Despite always appearing as if he’s just got out of bed, Kitai is no slouch at the table and is widely respected in the poker community. Kitai perfected his poker skills during a trip to Los Angeles in 2003. He had gone to the States to learn English, but it was Texas Hold’em that he mastered. He is #1 (and streets ahead) in the Belgium all-time money list.
Seat 4: Adrian Mateos Diaz, 19, Spain Very few people had a better 2013 in poker than Adrian Mateos Diaz. The 19 year-old from Spain, who now lives in London, beat a field of 632 this time last year to win the Estrellas Poker Tour Madrid event for over €100,000. A few months late he followed it up by winning the WSOPE Main Event for €1,000,000 which sent straight up to 3rd in the all-time rankings for Spain.
At the GPI Awards last week, Diaz came away with the GPI Spanish Player of the Year as well as Rookie of the Year for his outstanding performances. He'll have a lot of work to do tomorrow though as Diaz will be the short stack at the final table.
Seat 5: Kent Lundmark, 25, Stockholm, Sweden Lundmark was already an EPT regular when he took down EPT Barcelona in Season 8 for a massive €825,000. However his first impact on the tour came in January 2010 when he was the longest-lasting Swede at the PCA - finishing in 29th place for $66,000.
Other successes on the EPT include winning an EPT9 London £1k side event and runner-up in an EPT Sanremo €2k event. Lundmark, currently tenth on Sweden’s all time money list, finished 21st in the EPT Prague High Roller last December for €18,950 and has two other EPT side event victories to his name. His lifetime tournament winnings already total nearly $2 million. Lundmark first started playing poker seven years ago after finishing high school. He is also a keen footballer and has played for a team in Sweden’s Fourth Division.
Seat 6: Dominik Panka, 22, Poland When Panka qualified for this year’s PCA – and then won it for $1,423,096 – he was totally uknown on the live circuit. However his composure and studied determination impressed every one who saw it and when he beat EPT veteran and Dortmund champion Mike McDonald heads-up (a player with far more live tournament experience), no one saw it as anything other than a well-deserved victory.
Panka hails from the tiny town of Brześć Kujawski in Poland and before the PCA only had $8,092 in live tournament cashes to his name, the majority of that from a 42nd place finish in the EPT 10 Barcelona Estrellas €2k High Roller. After his PCA victory, Panka said: “I’m an internet player and I haven’t played many live tournaments. I only started playing live last year and I expected my first big cash to be a tenth of this! It’s weird because I didn’t feel too much pressure on the final table. I concentrated on being a rock, a statue, and now I can’t really dance with joy because I’m still in that mindset.”
Thanks to his PCA victory, Panka was understandably under the spotlight during the EPT Deauville Main Event however, yet again, he seemed wholly unruffled by the attention and spent much of his time at the table reading a thriller by Lee Child. He didn’t cash in that event but has more than made up for it by reaching the final table in the EPT Deauville High Roller.
Seat 7: Albert Daher, 26, Lebanon Albert Daher is a poker player from Lebanon and good friends with many of the other Lebanese poker players including Jeff Hakim who made the final of EPT Deauville last year and went deep again this time.
Daher had his biggest ever results last year over the space of a few weeks. First he came second in the Merit World Cup of Poker for $137,299 and followed this up by finishing second in the WPT Merit Classic for $160,200. Daher has cashed twice in EPT Main Events: he came 28th at EPT London in Season 9 and 72nd at EPT Barcelona in Season 10. Daher will go into the final table as the chip leader and only has eyes on winning the event
Seat 8: Ondrej Vinklarek, 28, Kolin, Czech Republic Ondrej “vinkyy” Vinklarek was the EPT8 Player of the Year and already has lifetime tournament winnings totalling more than $600k.
Vinklarek, 28, from Kolin, has been a poker pro for more than four years. As a Chess Candidate Master with a FIDE ranking of 2100, he first came across poker while playing at a big chess festival where they were promoting a live poker free-roll. He said: “I didn’t know the rules and had no idea what Texas Hold’em was but it was still fun. Later on I was in a shop with friends and we saw a chip set, so we started playing home games. After that I started playing small buy-in tournaments online.”
At the time, Vinklarek was studying Maths and Physics at Charles University; the turning point in his poker career came when he entered a $24 tourney online - and won it for $6,000.
Vinklarek’s best result to date was besting a 652-strong field in last year’s WCOOP $530 NL Re-buy tourney for $160,000. His biggest live cash was runner-up in a EPT Berlin €2k last season for €63,000 and other big scores include winning a €1k side event at EPT8 Barcelona, runner-up in an EPT8 Prague €5k NL Turbo and winning an EPT Barcelona €2k NL Turbo at the start of this season.
In Season 8, the year he won EPT Player of the Year, he said: “This has definitely been a break-out 12 months for me – both the WCOOP win and now doing so well in this season’s EPT side events.”
Vinklarek, dubbed “the Czech Chris Moorman”, first took the lead in the EPT8 Player of the Year race in Prague by winning the €1k NL Turbo Bounty, finishing second in the €5k NL Turbo side event and making the final of a €1k side event. He kept up the pace at the 2012 PCA when he finished third (out of 236) in a $2k NL Turbo tourney. He has nine other cashes on the European Poker Tour worth $10k or more.
