Level: 27
Blinds: 25,000/50,000
Ante: 5,000
2011 PokerStars.com EPT Prague
Main Event
Day: 5
Event Info
Final Results
Event Info
Level Info
2011 PokerStars.com EPT Prague
Buy-in
€5,000
Prize Pool
€3,501,700
Entries
722
Level
32
Blinds
80,000 / 160,000
Ante
20,000
Level 27
: 25,000/50,000, 5,000 ante
Day 5 of the 2011 PokerStars.com EPT Prague is upon us and you know what that means -- it's time to crown a champion. With €775,000 up for grabs for first-place prize money, it's going to be a great day of poker.
Below you can read the bios from all of the remaining eight players in the event. Martin Fingers is the man on top with 5.8 million in chips, but not too far off is Nicolas Levi. Ari Engel is the other star at the table and searching for his largest live score ever.
Final Table Seat Draw
| Seat | Player | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mads Wissing | 420,000 |
| 2 | Guillem Usero | 1,405,000 |
| 3 | Nicolas Levi | 5,690,000 |
| 4 | Martin Finger | 5,800,000 |
| 5 | Andreas Wiese | 1,615,000 |
| 6 | Ari Engel | 1,670,000 |
| 7 | Denys Drobyna | 1,180,000 |
| 8 | Danyel "David" Boyaciyan | 3,770,000 |
Play is set to kick off shortly at noon. Get your popcorn ready, kick back and relax. The excitement awaits!
Mads Wissing is a well-respected cash game and tournament player in Denmark who is known for his merciless style. He is close friends with other Danish pros such as 2008 world champion Peter Eastgate, EPT4 Barcelona winner Sander Lylloff, EPT2 Copenhagen champion Mads Andersen and Claus Bek Nielsen. His live tournament deep runs include last year’s WSOP Main Event when he was eliminated in 25th place by Sweden’s William Thorson.
In September, Wissing made the final of the Partouche Main Event in Cannes before being knocked out in ninth by the eventual champion Sam Trickett. He also recently competed in the International Federation of Poker’s World Championships as part of a seven-man Danish team that included Gus Hansen, Team PokerStars Pro Theo Jorgensen, Mads Andersen and Lars Bonding. As well as his live successes, Wissing has also won several online tournaments including two Sunday majors.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
PokerStars player Guillem Usero has been playing poker for two and a half years, the last two as a pro. He mainly plays online cash games at the $3/6 to $25/50 levels and occasionally online tournaments. His best online result being third in a $100 Rebuy tourney on PokerStars for around $100,000.
He also plays live tourneys and his best live result to date – apart from making this EPT Prague final – was fifth place at WPT Barcelona last May for €40,000. He also cashed in the Estrellas Madrid Main Event last February.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
Nicolas Levi came across poker by accident, seven years ago, while he was studying computer science in the UK. On his laptop, Levi discovered “A totally different game. A mix of psychology and mathematics.” He said, “From the very first hand, I thought ‘this is the game for me’. Beating chance seemed a very exciting challenge.”
Since then, Levi has become a regular on the international poker scene, and never without his signature trilby hat. The Season 8 EPT Prague final is not his first. Way back in Season 3, Levi made the final of EPT Dortmund, finishing seventh place for € 85,700. He has also achieved numerous other deep runs; his four WSOP finals include fifth in the 2010 WSOP Europe Main Event for ￡208,119 and sixth in the $10,000 Pot-Limit Hold'em Championship for $114,525. Levi been based in the UK since 2000 – and in London for the last four years, although originally from Paris, France.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
Business science student and PokerStars qualifier Martin Finger has been playing poker for about three years, kicking off in home games with friends before finding his way into online poker. Online is where he thrives, and he has already earned Supernova Elite status on Pokerstars. Regularly online, he grinds the heads-up Sit-N-Gos, but he also plays a lot of EPTs.
As well as winning his seat to Prague, he qualified for EPT Loutraki a few weeks ago but didn't cash. He has done well in EPT side events, however, including runner-up in the EPT Barcelona €1,000 event for €42,000, third in the EPT Barcelona heads-up tourney in Season 7 and ninth in a €1,000 EPT Berlin side event.
Making the final at EPT Prague -- where he’s guaranteed at least €66,700 -- is by far his biggest live score to date.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
PokerStars qualifier Andreas Wiese has been playing poker for six years, mainly focusing on live games. He’s been playing tournaments for a couple of years – his best result to date being sixth place at EPT Vienna last season.
That was his first major event, but he also came third in a €1,000 side event here in Prague last year and was 14th at EPT Snowfest in March.
He regularly plays cash games at his local casino in Hannover and considers himself a “semi-professional” although still working as an anaesthesist at Hannover Hospital.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
Back in his college days, PokerStars qualifier Ari Engel used to watch his roommate play online poker, but he didn’t start pursuing the sport himself until after graduation. When he finally threw a few bucks on to a poker site, it only took ten days of gains to convince him to quit his job and take up the game full-time.
Since then, Engel has earned close to $2.5 million online, at one point climbing to the very top of the online player rankings. He's also begun to amass a respectable live record that includes two WSOP Circuit rings and more than $500,000 in cashes. Things have gone so well for Engel that he's recently begun to give lessons on tournament poker and his students' results indicate that "BodogAri" knows how to teach the game.
Now based in Canada, Engel won his seat on PokerStars. This is his first ever EPT.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
Denys Drobyna is a full-time poker pro who mainly plays online -- No-Limit Hold'em cash games at the $5/10 to $25/50 levels. Online cash games are his bread and butter and he hardly ever plays online tourneys, but he does enjoy competing at live events “for fun”.
He made his first EPT appearance at Dortmund in Season 4 and reckons he has played around six EPTs so far. His best EPT finish to date was 25th place at EPT San Remo six weeks ago. His best overall live result was 15th place in a 2008 World Series of Poker $2,000 event for $35,843.
He said, “I’ve been playing well here in Prague, and I’ve also been lucky. I won a couple of coin flips but you need to be able to fold right, raise right and get the right cards at the right time. I feel very focused right now. I need to be. There are a lot of good players still in.”
Drobyna won Skrill’s Last Longer contest at Prague having outlasted more than 100 players who took part. This means his €5,300 buy-in will be credited back into his Skrill account.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.
When Danyel "David" Boyaciyan won the Master Classics of Poker in Amsterdam last month for €382,200, it took the poker world by storm. Not only had a total unknown bested some of the best players in the world, but he wasn’t even a pro.
Boyaciyan is a banker by trade who won his seat to the MCOP in a live satellite. He said, “My advantage as an amateur is that I don’t know who anyone is, so I can’t get intimidated. But I have also been very lucky. I went into the Master Classics final thinking I’d come eighth or ninth. But I was never the short-stack, and that stimulated me to just play tight and see if I could creep up the places.”
Following his Amsterdam victory, Boyaciyan decided to play EPT Loutraki and Prague just to see how far his luck would run -- and finds himself back on another major final table within the month. But players who think Boyaciyan is only about luck might be chastened to discover that last summer he played two WPTs at the Bellagio and final tabled both.
He comes to the EPT Prague final armed with a lucky chip card protector bearing a photo of his 18-month-old daughter Elina. At the MCOP, he had a chip with a photo of his four-year-old son Joel. Both kids are at home being looked after by Boyaciyan’s wife Hilda.
Bio courtesy of PokerStars.