Last night on FSN at 8pm and 11pm local time, World Poker Tour took a trip across the pond back to one of the locations that first made WPT truly a “world” poker tour. Aviation Club de France played host to WPT Grand Prix de Paris for many seasons and is continuing that tradition during the historic tenth season of WPT programming.
The first episode of WPT Grand Prix de Paris took viewers from “Shuffle Up and Deal” all the way down to final table play with plenty of poker action along the way. From interviews with players to hand-by-hand commentary from WPT Anchor Kimberly Lansing, viewers received an immersive look at the tournament as the field whittled down from the 312 entrants who started the event to the six who make up the final table (profiled in the above video).
Here are those players with their chip counts as they entered the final table:
Seat 1: Martin Jacobson: 482,000
Seat 2: Mikko Sundell: 1,791,000
Seat 3: Matthew Waxman: 1,423,000
Seat 4: Frederic Magen: 1,554,000
Seat 5: Hugo Lemaire: 1,962,000
Seat 6: Byron Kaverman: 2,079,000
As final table play began, five of the six players were relatively close in chips with Jacobsen as the short stack. That short stack, and some seriously aggressive play by some of his Scandinavian table mates, proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for the young Swede as he was the first player to exit, finishing in sixth place for €88,900.
The episode ended with Finn Mikko Sundell as the chip leader after some gutsy calls, raises and folds to get him to the top of the leaderboard. Can he close the deal and ride the chip lead to a WPT title that would see his name etched on the WPT Champions Cup? Tune in next week to FSN at 8pm and 11pm local time for WPT Grand Prix de Paris: Part 2 as we get closer to awarding the $729,886 first-place prize and crowning another WPT Champion.
