Day 1B at the www.pokerstars.com European Poker Tour Barcelona saw 279 of the world´s strongest players take to the felt in the hope of winning the €1,170,000 first prize in the inaugural tournament of this season´s European circuit.
Among the U.S. contingent were Johnny Chan, Greg Raymer, Daniel Negreanu, and Liz Lieu.
They were joined by Humberto Brenes from Costa Rica, Isabelle Mercier from Canada, and a who´s who of European poker players, including Thomas Wahlroos, Martin Wendt, , Ben Grundy, John Shipley, Jon Kalmar, Marcel Luske, George McKeever, Ian Woodley, Peter Dalhuijsen, Anders Hoivold, Dag Martin Mikklesen, Patrik Antonius, Rene Mouritsen, Sylvester Geoghegan, Praz Banzi, Barny Boatman, Thor Hansen, Dave Colclough, Jonas Molander, Stig Tap Rasmussen, and Marc Goodwin.
Former international footballer Tony Cascarino was in trouble by the first break. "My table´s a nightmare. It´s raise, reraise…" he said, trailing off, rolling his eyes, and shaking his head. "He´s on tilt," said his friend Bruce from Littlewoods Poker, "and I´m out here keeping him company."
Cascarino fell by the wayside shortly afterwards.
Irishman Sylvester Geoghegan, who recently came 13th in the $10,000 pot-limit Omaha championship at the WSOP, was slightly frustrated at his table early on. "My table is dead. No one is doing anything," he complained. "That´ll change after the break," he said with his trademark cheeky grin. He ended the day on €28,300 in chips.
Englishman Ian Woodley, who came second in the Irish Open in 2006, found himself at the table of death. "I have Greg Raymer to my left and Patrik Antonius to my right," he said at the first break. "I have 8,000 chips but went down to 6,000 at one point, so i´m happy enough. The play is really slow though, but it's early days yet. Once the blinds get higher guys like Raymer are going to get busy." Woodley himself got busy and ended the day with €29,200 in chips.
Raymer did indeed get busy too but by midnight his tournament was over. "In my first three or four hands i got up to : €13,000 and even though there were some tough players at my table, there were some pretty weak players as well and I identified a couple of them immediately and I was pretty sure I knew how to take advantage of them.Then I took a bad beat in a hand and suddenly I was back to where i started. Then I lost a cold deck hand where we had a four way unraised pot and I had J-10 and the flop comes J-J-8 with a potential flush draw. The guy in the big blind is the one who´s giving me action. It turns out he has A-J.
"Then i took another bad beat and I find myself down to €4,000. Then I lost a hand where my raise was with A-Q and he called again on a flop of K-9-4. I´m sure he didn´t know what I had and was just feeling like he´d get lucky or something. I lost so now i´m down to 3,000 chips.
"Then i lost another small hand and I´m down to 2,100 when I suck out in my only lucky hand of the day. It was folded to the small blind who bet and i pushed all in with A-4. He called with 10-10 and I hit an ace. Then i won another pot and was up to 5,000.
"Then a key hand was when my opponent made a really horrible play. I don´t mean to insult the guy but it was really bad. Two people limped in for 200 and I raised to 900 and he pushes all in for 4,000. Now if he´s paying any attention at all he knows I have a good hand because I´ve not been playing a lot of hands and I´ve never turned over a weak starting hand especially if I´ve been a raiser. So i´m basically getting 2:1 on the pot so he should have know that he´s at least going to get called by me. He turns over K-J off suit against my J-J and he catches a four-card flush so now i´m down to 900.
"The very next hand I have jacks again. I´m the first one into the pot. I push all in. The big blind calls for 700 more. He called with Q-J. He got a queen on the last card and I´m out."
After midnight, Card Player spotted Dutch hotshot Peter Dalhuijsen mooching around the bar. He´d just come off back-to-back live tournament wins but was destined not to repeat the feat in Barcelona. "I felt I had been playing pretty well but it was kind of a strange tournament. The average stack was about 13,000 after like five hours of play. If you play a big pot, it's for pretty much all your chips."
"I got 7-5 and thought I was in a good position to raise because the table was very timid but I got three callers. So right away the pot was huge with €3,000 in the middle. The flop came K-9-2 with two clubs. So i checked to see what happens. The button bets half the pot. I correctly read it for a weak hand so after the blinds folded, I decided to raise it to €4,500 to give him a decision for all my chips basically.
"He was an American, and I have enough experience with those kind of players in Vegas. He was thinking for six or seven minutes and I was waiting. After two minutes i knew he had K-Q. I figured this guy´s ego wasn´t going to let him get bullied off the hand. Maybe i should have talked to him more, told him what his hand was to make him more insecure. In the end he moved all in and I was committed. He had K-Q, the flush didn´t fall and that was it."
Humberto Brenes was in flying form in the small hours of the morning. "I was up to €16,000 but i´m now down a little and will try and recover my stack for tomorrow," he said. "I played here last year, it´s a nice place. I just changed tables and have no information but the shark will come out in the last hour."
Towards the end of the evening, Ross Boatman found himself at a nightmare table with Patrik Antonius, Martin Wendt, and Marc Goodwin. "I just bluffed off most of my chips," he told Card Player with a philosophical smile, as he returned to his table to try to win them back. Unfortunately for Boatman he exited shortly afterwards.
Former Card Player Europe editor Rolf Slotboom suffered a travesty at the end of the evening. "I started off playing extremely tight as I often do in these tournaments," he explained. "So I just played big cards and waited, waited, waited. I was a bit unlucky to lose one pot with A-K against an all-in player, so I was short all day. At no point did I have more than €10,000 until the sixth level.
"Then I won two good-sized pots with kings versus K-10 and J-J versus 10-10 and suddenly I had €18,000. Then a new player came to the table. It was Christian Ulriksen, who I know very well, and to put it mildly, he's a little bit of a maniac. A good maniac, because if he has chips he's very dangerous.
"In the first hand that he played, he immediately raised. I was in the cutoff with two nines so I made a standard reraise on his 1,600 to 5,500 with 12,900 behind. Within one second he pushes all in. He has me covered by 5 or 6,000. I think 'oh no…he must have aces or kings.' What else can he have?
"So I think hard for about four minutes, I know his reputation, and there's a chance he's just making a move. So I think 'I'm not going to fold. I'm here to win.' So I called. And he shows his hand. A10 offsuit!"
"So I shout at the dealer, 'Small cards, small cards.' I was fine until the river. The last card was a 10. End of story."
At the end of the day, 116 players remained. They will be joined by the 99 players who made it through day 1A. Not incuded in the list of hopefuls heading into day 2 are Dave Colclough, Marcel Luske, Liz Lieu, Isabelle Mercier, Kevin O´Connell, Dario Minieri, Juha Helppi, Peter Dalhuijsen, Ben Grundy, Greg Raymer, Tony Cascarino, and Rolf Slotboom.
The chip leaders entering day 2 are:
1. Daniel Stern (USA): €101,500
2. Thomas Wahlroos (Finland): €87,800
3. Fabrice Soulier (France): €78,400
4. Gregory Dyer (USA): €76,500
5. Mark Teltscher (UK): €67,300
6. Mark Vos (Australia): €64,300
7. Sander Lylloff (Denmark): €62,600
8. Joris Bernard Jaspers (Holland): €62,150
9. Jean Paul Pasqualini (France): €61,900
10. Sverre Sundbo (USA): €60,500
Play resumes at 5 p.m. today, with a prize pool of €4.18 million being paid out to the top 56 players.
