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Home / Uncategorized / EPT11 Grand Final: The TV table

When talking about tough tables here on Day 1a of the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo®Casino EPT Grand Final Main Event it’s easier to list those that don’t contain a bunch of household names rather than those that do. But whilst there’s lots of tables competing for ‘table of death’ status, only one can claim to be ‘the TV table’

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Amiel (left) and Duthie (right)

That table is number 14 as it contains both John Duthie (seat one) and Alexandre Amiel (seat nine). When the two aren’t taking part in blind on blind battles they could, if they wished to, share stories of their careers in TV in the UK and France respectively. Duthie’s TV career is well known. He worked on shows such as Kavanagh QC, Clocking Off and Silent Witness, even picking up an award RTS award for Best Editing and a BAFTA Award for Best Drama Serial. It was then that he moved onto poker creating and producing the EPT coverage.

However, if you didn’t read our piece on Amiel during coverage of EPT10 Deauville, you’re probably not aware of Amiel’s body of work. Our interview goes into some depth about his career but the highlights are that he was a news reporter for Canal+ on their equivalent of 60 Minutes before setting up his own company producing documentaries, magazine programmes and talk shows, focusing on current affairs, culture and politics.

So much in common off the table, but at the table it’s Amiel who has the edge. He’s up to 37,000 whilst Duthie is struggling on 9,600. Wordplay aside the two of them are actually at an incredibly tough table. It contains: Salman Behbehani (26,000), WCOOP leader board winner Alan Gold (24,000), Tony Gregg (7,500) Jeffrey Hakim and Roger Hairabedian (90,000).

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Salman Behbehani and Jeffrey Hakim

As alluded to above though it’s got some pretty tough competition for table of death status. Want three EPT Main Event champions at the same table? We’ve got it! Mike McDonald, ElkY and Anton Wigg are all competing for the same chips. One table across you’ll find the two current WSOP Main Event champions. Martin Jacobson (WSOP) and Scott Davies (WSOP APAC) are seated together and they’ve got former number one online tournament player Patrick Leonard to contend with.

Table 10 is another ‘toughie’, if you were to rail that one you’d have Steve O’Dwyer, Timo Pfutzenreuter, Nicolas Chouity, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, Yucel ‘Mad Turk’ Eminoglu and Igor Yaroshevsky to keep you entertained.

Scott Seiver is certainly enjoying himself, we saw him laughing and sharing a joke with Ole Schemion, the former has 38,100 whilst Schemion has 45,000. They’re both doing better than Pierre Neuville who’s a lost around a third of his stack and has 21,000 left.

There are a couple of Germans left in the Super High Roller and there are two German bracelet winners sat side by side at table 15. George Danzer (three bracelets) has direct position on Dominik Nitsche (three bracelets). And they’re both probably glad of the fact that they aren’t seated at table eight. How’s this for a line-up:

Kevin MacPhee – EPT champion, over $3.4M in lifetime earnings
Martin Finger – EPT champion and EPT Super High Roller champion, over $4.775M in lifetime earnings
Fabian Quoss – PCA Super High Roller Champion, over $6.4M in lifetime earnings
Talal Shakerchi – EPT High Roller champion, over $2M in lifetime earnings
Mustapha Kanit – IPT champion, over $2.6M in lifetime earnings

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Kevin MacPhee and Martin Finger

Elsewhere you’ll find Pratyush Buddiga (32,000), Ivan Luca (105,000) and Connor Drinan (35,000) seated around the same oval, Team Pros Jason Mercier and Andre Akkari facing off and Eugene Katchalov and Davidi Kitai locking horns. Hopefully that gives you an idea into just how tough the field is in this €10,000 event. It’s the Grand Final after all.

You can follow all the action on PokerStars Blog: the Super High Roller is on the Super High Roller page, the Main Event is on the Main Event page and the France Poker Series event is on the FPS page.

It’s also about time you downloaded the EPT app. There you will get all the latest news, chip counts and payouts. You can download it on Android or IOS.

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