EPT Grand Final Day One

The first day at the European Poker Tour Grand Final in Monte Carlo is over.  The players were greeted in the tournament room like they were rock stars with blaring rock music and lots of lights. 

There was also a short video of the action at previous European Poker Tours to watch.  The meet and greet ended with last years Grand Final winner, Gavin Griffin holding up his Grand Final glass trophy as this year's trophy was lit up center stage.

There are players from everywhere at this tournament, online players, players from the UK and everywhere else.  This event is looking to be the biggest ever for the EPT.  There were 392 players in today's field, the first of the day ones for this year's event means that this event will completely overtake last years numbers.

Also playing was the tournament sponsor, PokerStars as their team of professionals turned out in full force.  The Team PokerStars Pro members in the field today included Greg Raymer, Katja Thater, Barry Greenstein, Isabelle Mercier, Humberto Brenes, Noah Boeken,  Andre Akkari, Raymond Rahme, and Tuan Lam. More than half of the team would end up walking out of the tournament room empty-handed before the day was through, as Akkari, Lam, Thater, Raymer, and Mercier all hit the rail.

There are still more big names of poker that started in this event and they fought to build their chip stacks but inevitably many would not remain to see day two. 

Some of the players that got eliminated were Phil Ivey, Marco “CrazyMarco” Johnson, Erick Lindgren, Pascal Perrault, Jeffrey Lisandro, Andreas Hoivold, Matt “ch0ppy” Kay, Ben Grundy, Tony G, Andreas Krause, David Colclough, Julian Thew, John Kabbaj, Annette Obrestad, and Barny Boatman.

The day was scheduled to close after six levels of play but the tounament organizers announced before play had started that they had changed it to seven levels of play.  But that caused some of the players to complain so the end result was a compromise of six and a half levels.

Play ended at about 1:15am local time and 180 players remain after enduring more then 12 hours of play.  The players will get tomorrow off so they can rest up and get ready for the combined field of 2 on Monday.

The chip leaders at the end of the night were; Stephan Kjerstad with 100,000 in chips, followed by Johnny Lodden with 90,000 in chips.  In third is Shaun Deeb with 80,000 in chips, Woody Deck is in fourth with 66,000 in chips and Maxome Willemure is in fifth place with 52,000 in chips. 

The player in sixth place with 50,000 in chips is Peter Roche.  Marcel Luske is in seventh place with 48,000 in chips and Mel Judah has 47,350 in chips for the with position.  Finally in ninth place is Thomas Fougerson with 40,000 in chips.

Play will be resuming Monday morning at 7am ET or 1pm locate time.