It remains unclear as to what exactly happened, but the third casualty on Day 1 is High Roller regular Julian Thomas. New faces include Asi Moshe, Kristen Bicknell and Sergio Aido while Jean-Noel Thorel, Ryan Riess and Thomas Muehloecker all boosted their stacks early on.
On a three-way flop, action was checked to Michal Ozimek who bet 1,700. Rens Feenstra folded, Koray Aldemir check-raised to 5,100 and Ozimek called. On the turn, Aldemir bet 8,200 and Ozimek called again.
Aldemir bet 19,000 on the river and this time, Ozimek folded within seconds.
With 12,000 in the middle and the turn showing , big stack Andrei Konopelko bet 4,400 out of the big blind. His sole remaining opponent, Quan Zhou on the button, let his shot clock run down to five seconds before raising to 9,000. Konopelko himself also used the entire shot clock and sent his cards into the muck.
Georgios Vrakas, who won the €1,100 PokerStars National Championship here in Prague a few days ago, sat down while the hand was taking place and Romain Lewis on the same table is also a recent addition to the field. Furthermore, Tsugunari Toma just entered the competition while a new table opened.
Until yesterday, Jasper Meijer van Putten held the distinction of being the last ever EPT-champion. However, with PokerStars bringing back the EPT next year, Meijer van Putten's status will be relegated to just 'EPT champion' in a few months time.
Last year's champion may have busted the Main Event already, there's another title he's technically going back-to-back for. The Dutchman conquered the first €10,300 High Roller in the Hilton Hotel earlier this week to win €150,000 and added another spadie to his mantlepiece.
"This is a fantastic back-to-back for me," Meijer van Putten said after winning his second trophy in Prague. We'll keep track of Meijer van Putten today to see if he can make a deep run at yet another title again.
Out of the 116 entries, two players have been eliminated thus far and one of them was no other than Steve O'Dwyer. After losing half of his stack in an early confrontation with Koray Aldemir, he was not able to recover and will have to re-enter in order to take a shot at the prize pool.
Below are further assorted new entries that joined recently.
The board was already complete and showed , and Akin Tuna was first to act in the hijack. Tuna bet 3,000 into a pot of 9,000 and that forced out Tobias Peters in the cutoff. Dinesh Alt on the button had other plans and raised to 16,000, which was called by Tuna.
Alt rolled over the for a full house and that was more than enough to rake in a decent pot and gift the Swiss with two times the starting stack.
A small pot between Kenny Hallaert and [Removed:17] saw the latter walk away with the pot. Hallaert was in position and bet 2,000 on a board and Yan called. Both players checked the on the river.