By Lisa Yiasemides
April 6 featured the first outing of the WPTDeepStacks online series hosted by WPT and partypoker.eu. Over the next three weeks, players from France and Spain have the opportunity to play a fantastic selection of tournaments of varying stakes on their shared liquidity site. With one day already in the books, who has got out of the starting blocks early?
Kicking off the series was The Opener, or perhaps that should be ‘The Openers’, as there were three installments to choose from, each appealing to players at different stake levels. The progressive knock-out tournaments all began at 7 pm* and comprised of €100 Main, €20 Mini and €5 Micro events.
With a €50,000 guarantee attached to it, the €100 Main Event was naturally going to attract some quality poker talent. A total of 541 entries were logged and of those, it was ‘jamasse’ who took it down. They netted €6,816.24 (€3,070.29 in bounties) for the win and secured their biggest cash to date on this account, bringing their running total profit to $17,900.
It must have been a tough journey to the top though, with some big names making some deep runs. ‘CallM3Daddy’, a player who finished 20th on the partypoker.eu leaderboard rankings in 2018, finished runner up, taking €3,740.54 (€648.11 in bounties) and bringing their total to $44,275.
‘La Twice’ narrowly missed out on a final table seat, after making it as far as 10th place. They will have to console themselves with the €625.51 won and the fact that there are still nine months in which to try and improve on their 12th place finish in last year’s network leaderboard rankings, with €43,677 in cashes in 2019.
In the €20 mini event, ‘deolly’ took €3,126.98 (€1,761.52 in bounties), after pipping heads up specialist ‘ROCKnROLLA-22’ to the post, a player who is currently 4th in the Heads Up Turbo $101-$300 rankings so far this year. Newcomer to the site ‘TheMicroGrinder’ was the winner of the €5 micro event, not bad at all for someone who only started playing on the site the day before! They secured an €888.09 cash (€318.65 in bounties) for the result.
Next up it was time to focus on the flagship event of the series: The Main Event. With one starting flight for each day of the 16-day festival, these tournaments promise to be huge! The buy-ins are €250 for the Main, €50 for the Mini and €5 for the Micro and feature blind levels of 15, 12 and 10 minutes respectively. Players start with 30,000 in chips.
The Main has a whopping €500,000 guarantee and there is a single entry available in each flight, with 156 players taking a seat in the first of those. From the starting field, ‘balbasau9’ (577,574) goes through as chip leader and ‘joslopgon’ (223,117), who finished 18th for profit on the 2019 leaderboard, also takes through a stack after finishing in 7th place. Two big names ran deep but fell short of qualifying for Day 2 and they were ‘hasann’ (35th) and ‘betsxxl’ (45th) but they are likely to return for another shot in future flights.
There were 351 entries in the €200,000 guaranteed €50 Mini Main Event. After 19 levels, 52 survived to Day 2. ‘KingOfBusted’ bagged biggest and takes 468,635 through. They will face stiff competition from many opponents but particularly ‘EL_RONDO’ (248,919) who has dominated in the partypoker.eu rankings for the last two years, finishing 1st on the profit leaderboard in 2018 and following it up with a top-five finish last year.
‘allin5011989’ took the chip lead with 621,948 in the Micro €5 event, with 891 players generating over €4,000 towards the €20,000 prizepool. They along with all the other survivors will reconvene at 8 pm on Sunday, April 20.
In the meantime though, there is plenty more excitement to look forward to with many highlights of the festival yet to come. They include the €250/€50/€5 PKOs tonight, April 6, at 7 pm (€50,000/€25,000 and €3,000 guaranteed), a €250/€50/€5 8-Max NLH at 7 pm on Thursday April 9 (€50,000/€25,000 and €3,000 guaranteed) with too many to list in full here! The entire schedule can be found via partypoker LIVE.
There will also be three special High Roller events for partypoker.fr players: The €500 buy-in (€100,000 guaranteed) ‘Platinum’ event on Sunday, April 12 at 7 pm; the ‘Elite’ a €1,000 buy-in event (€100,000 guaranteed) on Monday April 13 at 7 pm; and the ‘Prestige’, the highest buy-in event at €2,000 (€100,000 guaranteed).
As if all that wasn’t enough to get your competitive juices flowing – come and pit yourself against the competition in the WPTDeepStacks Last Longer Promotion!
Last longer:
Play any side events of your choices in the 3 category levels of buy-ins below**:
•Main event: buy-ins from €100 to €2 000
•Mini main event: buy-ins from €20 to €50
•Micro main event: buy-ins from €2 to €5
Make it to the final table on one or several side events to be eligible for the Last Longer promotion
Then buy-in to the main event in the same level of buy-in to participate in the Last Longer
•Main Event: buy-in €250
•Mini Main Event: buy-in €50
•Micro Main Event: buy-in €5
Be “The Last Player Standing” to win the competition and get a seat to a WPTDeepStacks Main Event Live!
*Please note all times referred to are CEST
** Promotion valid only on partypoker.fr