PokerStars Welcomes It's Biggest Ever Team to the EPT10 Prague
Welcome back to Season 10 of the European Poker Tour. It’s been an incredible season thus far as Tom “hitthehole” Middleton and Robin Ylitalo won the EPT Barcelona and EPT London respectively, and today we’ll take the first step toward crowning a champion in Prague, which is the largest city in the Czech Republic.
This marks the seventh time the EPT has visited Prague, and it comes on the heels of the Eureka Prague Poker Festival. According to the PokerStars Blog, a record 171 tournament staff from numerous countries was brought in for the festival, which makes it the biggest ever team at a PokerStars live event (including the PCA)! EPT tournament directors Teresa Nousiainen and Thomas Lamatsch.
"I was lucky enough to work Season 1 of the EPT and it's amazing to see how much it's grown,” Nousiainen said. “In those days, we had around 300 players for the main event, and maybe just one side event a day. Now just a "normal" EPT Festival has at least 40 events and EPT Prague will have 47 - on some days, there will be up to ten events running at the same time - so we're going to be very very busy."
Indeed, the event has gotten so big that for the first time ever the tournament area has spilled out of the Hilton Prague’s Congress Hall into the attached lobby area. All told 90 poker tables, 200,000 poker chips, 10,000 player cards and 500m of electrical cabling will be used to bring the EPT Prague to life.
The EPT Prague has a rich history, which was recently highlighted in a special edition of Where Are They Now on PokerNews. Last year, the EPT9 Prague attracted 864 players and saw well-respected pro Ramzi Jelassi emerge victorious to capture the €835,000 first-place prize. Other winners include Arnaud Mattern (Season 4), Salvatore Bonavena (Season 5), Jan Skampa (Season 6), Roberto Romanello (Season 7), and Martin Finger (Season 8).
Dozens of notables are slated to play Day 1a including Team PokerStars Pros Vanessa Selbst, Ville Wahlbeck, Dario Minieri, Henrique Pinho, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Eugene Katchalov and Mickey Petersen. In addition they will be joined by the likes of Daniel Laidlaw, Elio Fox, Simon Ravnsbaek, Ole Schemion, Steve O’Dwyer, and JC Alvarado, just to name a few.
Action will kick off at Noon local time, which is just a couple hours from now. Join us then as we bring you all the action from the floor of the Hilton Prague!