Results of the EPT San Remo Season Four
Date - 1-5 April 2008
Buy-in - €5000
Entrants – 701
Prize Pool - €3 195 860
Online Qualifier Takes the Title Yet Again!
The penultimate event of Season Four of the European Poker Tour was won by twenty-one-year-old online qualifier from Florida in the United States, Jason Mercier. What makes his maiden victory all the more rewarding is he nearly didn’t make it to the big time because his posse of travelling buddies opted for a night out on the tiles in Europe’s capitol of adult entertainment, Amsterdam, instead!
Although it was only Mercier’s second major live poker tournament in his short poker-playing career, he caused some consternation at the final table when it took him just two hands to beat Frenchman, Anthony Lellouche, into second place – it was arguably one of the quickest heads-up contests in the history of the EPT.
Local boy, Italian Dario Minieri, went to the final table with the deepest stack, closely followed by Mercier but it was American, Marcus Bower who had the unenviable task of vying for the title as the short stack. Hand after hand passed him by and it wasn’t long before Bower was outside enjoying the warmth of the San Remo sunshine and over $120 000 to spend!
Slovakian, Dag Palovic, was the next to crumble in 7th place, his pocket Queens couldn’t stand up to Minieri’s set of threes. Oddly enough he met exactly the same fate at the EPT Prague over a year ago, finishing seventh! Sweden’s William Thorson, who is reputed to be a formidable master of tournament play, exited next. His A-Q wasn’t good enough for Mercier’s A-K and when the flop featured a King, Thorson was dead!
Dario Minieri did the unthinkable by eliminating his countryman, Gregory Genovese and twenty minutes later France’s Erick Koskas was out in the cold. The hand had made it to the river showing 5-J-6-8-8 and the courageous Frenchman went all in but Mercier was holding 9-5 giving him a pair of fives which decimated a Koskas bluff! Then it was the shock of the tournament – homeboy Dario Minieri was quite simply outmanoeuvred by the eventual champion and all that was left was the heads-up.
In the words of runner-up Anthony Lellouche: “I knew he was a tough heads up player, he played good all day long.” said Antony. “I got two sevens, a huge hand heads-up and I have the short stack so I don’t care about a coin-flip, so I pushed in my chips. I finished second by playing four pots of less than 100,000. But I think I played good. Not my poker but good poker”.
Final Table Results
- Jason Mercier - €869 000 ($1 364 330)
- Anthony Lellouche – €505 000 ($792 850)
- Dario Minieri – €287 600 ($451 532)
- Eric Koskas – €223 600 ($351 052)
- Gregory Genovese – €188 500 ($295 945)
- William Thorson – €140 600 ($220 742)
- Dag Palovic – €111 800 ($175 526)
- Marcus Bower - € 76 700 ($120 419)
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