One of the biggest events of the year is set to begin tomorrow in Monte Carlo as the €10,000 PokerStars European Poker Tour Grand Final kicks off the first of its two starting days. The tournament is scheduled to run all week, with the final table taking place on Thursday.
CardPlayer.com’s tournament reporting team is on hand to catch and report all the poker action. Click here for the tournament page.
The Grand Final wraps up the EPT’s fourth season and because of the terrible exchange rate between dollars and Euros, it will no doubt produce one of the largest prize pools of 2008. The buy-in of tomorrow’s event is around $14,000.
Last years winner, Gavin Griffin, took $2.4 million back to the states by outlasting 705 other entrants. Runner-up Marc Karam also won more than a million dollars ($1.4 million).
Last year’s EPT Grand Final was a kind of a coming out party for the tour. The field more than doubled from the previous year. That year, Jeff Williams won $1.08 million by beating a field of 298. Karam made the final table of that event too, finishing fourth.
The first EPT Grand Final attracted 211 players and was won by Rob Hollink of the Netherlands. He is the only EPT Grand Final champion not from the United States.
This is the eleventh event of EPT’s season four and the 33rd event in the EPT’s history. Griffin made history recently by becoming the first poker player to win a World Series of Poker bracelet, a World Poker Tour title and an EPT title. It should be fun to see if he could become the first back-to-back EPT champion ever.
