Team Full Tilt Look to Dominate Live Poker. Again.

Posted by AlCantHang | Filed under Bloggers on the Rail

Things get quite bizarre around me when I find myself going a week’s length of time without serious internet access. I always have my trusty iPhone on my person in case immediate situations present themselves where I need access to a search engine for frivolous trivia answers, but it doesn’t give the outlet for my inter-words or a chance to follow along with things in the poker world. That was the situation I found myself over the last week when I left the grind of the Borgata Poker Open and took a little birthday time away in an island paradise.

So what has happened over the last few days that might be of interest to the casual fan of poker? Members of Team Full Tilt putting a big stamp on the World Series of Poker Europe and an FTP Heads Up grinder collects a WPT win after an huge comeback.

First out of the chute is the easy reporting duty since I was there in person. 1,018 players entered the 2009 WPT Borgata Poker Open Championship, they battled for 5 days until we finally found ourselves looking at a heads up match for the title. Olivier “livb112″ Busquet found himself looking at a massive underdog chip stack going up against blackjack specialist Jeremy Brown. Busquet makes his living tearing through $1,000 Heads Up SnG’s on Full Tilt Poker, booking over $1,500,000 in earnings. Brown’s claim to fame seemed to be chugging a beer per orbit and shots of Patrone with his friends. At one point Busquet was all in with his last 1,800,000 in chips versus the +30,000,000 of Brown, behind and turning lucky. Battle after battle, he eventually turned the tide and took down the title. It will certainly be one of the more interesting telecasts of the new season next spring. You can catch his victory interview with Amanda Leatherman here.

In the big news across the pond, we saw members of Team Full Tilt dominate the early WSOP-E events and making a run at the Main Event as we read/write this post. With just 4 total events during this London-based series, players did not have the luxury of warming up with a bunch of smaller events before jumping after a bracelet. The first event was a standard £1,000 buyin No Limit Hold’em tournament. While none of the Full Tilters ran huge in this starter event, we did have Markus Gloser and John Juanda make the money and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson just miss the final table in 15th.

Event #2 is where things became interesting. Just 158 players bought into the Mix Pot Limit Hold’em/Omaha for £2,500 with 18 players getting paid. Team Full Tilt member Vitaly Lunkin and “friend of the blog” Allie Prescott both made it into the money but could not get onto the final table. It was a talented final nine which included Howard Lederer, Hoyt Corkins, Chris Bjorin, Men “The Master” Nguyen, Ian Frazer and Erik Cajelais. In the end, Team Full Tilt had the first off the final table and the last man standing. Howard Lederer was eliminated in the 9th place while Erik Cajelais collects his first WSOP braclet to go along with his WPT Five Diamonds Classic title. Many of the players on the final day were also registered for Day 1 of the £5,000 PLO tournament and there seemed to be a lot of live multi-tabling going on.

Howard Lederer would not let his 9th place finish hamper his efforts in Event #3, £5,000 Pot Limit Omaha sure to attract the best European poker players around. 154 players were in the running to start Day 1 but only 18 would make the money and a chance at the bracelet. Tom “durrrr” Dwan has been known to play a few hands of PLO on occasion (tongue firmly in cheek) but he was unable to crack the final table coming in 14th. Nearly half of the final was composed of the red and white patches of Full Tilt with Robert Williamson III, Hendon Mobster Ross Boatman, Roberto Romanello and Howard Lederer in the last nine. Howard Lederer was poised to capture the second bracelet for FTP but was unable to overcome Jani Vilmunen to finish second. That is back-to-back final table finishes for “The Professor”.

The £10,000 No Limit Hold’em Main Event is will underway and there are just two tables left battling it out. John Juanda won the bracelet in 2008 but was unable to defend his title. James Akenhead has a fantastic chance to duplicate the feat by Ivan Demidov last year. Demidov was already set up as a member of the “November Nine” in the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event when he went to Europe and final tabled that Main Event. Akenhead will represent Full Tilt Poker later this year for the WSOP Main Event final table and is now sitting mid-field with 18 players remaining in the European Main Event.

Also looking to make a run at this final bracelet you can find poker legend Doyle Brunson, Hendon Mobster Ram Vaswani, Tony Cousineau, Matt Hawrilenko, Daniel Negreanu, and Jason Mercier. There are no soft spots left in this field. They continue to grind away and hopefully we’ll have just one more great story for Team Full Tilt before the series is complete.

Popularity: 1% [?]