EPT London

22. September 2006 | Category: 50outs

We’re here in London now for the second stop of the EPT Season III. Katja is playing her “Day1” today. The event is sold out with 400 players. The premise here is very small and the fact that they took away a corner today (where yesterday have been 10 tables) to setup the final table does not really help.

Katja and Joe Hachem waiting for transport at Langham Hotel

Right now Katja is at about 15,000 Chips with about 150 players left (from 200 today) so pretty much ok. I post event images regulary at www.pokerstarsblog.de. Also the WCOOP on PokerStars is currently running and Katja played all events so far but no success yet, only a ton of bad beat (the O8 Limit event must have the worst, it took 4 rivers to take her down). Yesterday in the NLH with rebuys she played perfect poker (from what I know about the game) and after 4 hours with 25k in chips got it all-in against a player with the same amount of chips with AA on a Q-4-T flop for a 50k pot (chipleader at that time had 65k). On the flop she got check-raised all-in by her opponent holding AQo. Of course, the turn brought another Q and she lost the pot of the night so far. Not really funny as the winner was supposed to get over $200k and being in the top 10 with 800 left out of 2000 won’t hurt you chances.

There are also no news on the cash game front as we did not play any except a handfull of hands at 30/60 to steam off (and drop off some $ that meant).

We’re going back home on Monday and play “only” all the WCOOP events remaing before traveling to EPT Baden.

For all german readers, here is an article from “Tageschau” online about legality of online poker in germany (thanks B@ndit). I am not really feared by the article’s content, more the opposite. Also, they are obvious talking about playing for real money only but the don’t differentiate that in the text. Also from my knowledge it is still unclear where the game is really running – on the server of the poker provider or on the computer of the user. In the latter playing for real money is clearly illegal, in the former maybe not – the providers are running a perfect legal business in their jurisdication and as long as the law don’t explictly rules this out it could be legal. Anyway, I expect a downfall soon from the german IRS. Regular poker players (and pro’s of course) are clearly playing to make money, not (only) for fun. The might come after the winning. On the other side, nobody goes playing roulette or Lotto and says “I don’t play to win” to that reasoning might not work either. We’ll see.