European Poker Tour

The EPT is always growing and this year’s stop in Portugal has attracted a record number of players including a large amount of professionals

The European Poker Tour (EPT) has been making progress across the continent and once again they had a record turnout for the latest stop in Vilamoura, Portugal.

It is the second time the tour has visited the Casino Vilamoura and 384 people paid the €5,000 buy-in to compete in the latest championship of the EPT’s seventh season. This was a significant increase on the 322 players who came last year when Antonia Matias took home the title.

A number of Team PokerStars professionals and other top poker player were seen at the tournament making it hard work for the amateur players who had qualified through PokerStars or bought in directly.

WSOP bracelet winner David Williams was at the event as a member of Team PokerStars as was the EPT founder John Duthie. Other members of Team PokerStars playing included Dairo Minieri, Arnaud Mattern, JP Kelly, Vicky Coren and Alex Kravchenko. Other famous names at the event included Antonio Esfandiari, Annette OBrestad and 2010 WSOP bracelet winner James “flushy” Dempsey.


181 players came for Day 1A, at the end of play Team PokerStars Online professional Andre Coimbra was in the lead with a stack of 157,6000. Other pros on the leaderboard include Minieri in fourth place with 131,400, Esfandiari in fifth with 127,800 and Mattern in sixth with 119,200.

The next day, Day 1B was more active with 203 players taking part. By the time the day was over, Russian PokerStars qualifier Leonid Bilokur had a stack of 161,200 to take the overall lead.

On Day 2 the entire field came together with 221 players taking part. Esfandiari had a terrible start and dropped to 40,000 chips. There were a number of top professionals who also lost out very quckly on including EPT San Remo Champion Liv Boeree, Lex Beldhuis, Mizzi, Coren and Williams.

According to the PokerStars blog, in the middle of Day 2 Coimbra had built his chip stack up to about 220,000, but there were many other players who had gone past him, placing him somewhere in the middle of the Top Ten.

At the time of writing Poland’s Grzegorz Cichocki had a small lead over Cantu, with Kelly and Trickett also doing well on the leaderboard.