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Monday, Nov. 3, 2008

Weekend winners: EPT, WSOPC find champs

By Sarah Polson

The major tournament schedule has been packed full of events around the world and the weekend brought another PokerStars.com European Poker Tour winner, as well as a World Series of Poker Circuit event winner.

The two events may have seemed worlds apart, with the EPT taking place in Hungary and the WSOPC at the Horseshoe Hammond in Indiana, but they had both their fare share of poker talent in the mix and plenty of money on the line.

EPT Budapest

Budapest in Hungary was a new stop for the EPT, but that didn't prevent hundreds of people showing up for the poker action last week. The event got started Oct. 28 with 531 players shelling out €4,350 to play.

The result was a €2,128,000 prize pool with more than a few well-known pros looking for a piece of it. Annette Obrestad, Barney Boatman, Sorel Mizzi, Katja Thater, David Colclough, Fabrice Soulier, Dario Minieri, Vicki Coren, Bertrand Grospellier and many more were at the tables on either Day 1a or Day 1b.

"The EPT has once again proved that we can move into emerging markets like Hungary and provide a sell-out tournament," said John Duthie, EPT founder.

"The support from the local players has been overwhelming and players have also been happy to travel from all over the world to attend the inaugural event in Budapest."

A few big names managed to make it into the money, including Mizzi, Kara Scott and Alex Kravchenko, but it was the following players who made it to the final table to battle for the top prize:

Seat 1: Marino Serenelli, $357,000
Seat 2: Will Fry, $572,000
Seat 3: Ciprian Hriska, $1,038,000
Seat 4: Gino Alacqua, $466,000
Seat 5: Martin Jacobson, $306,000
Seat 6: Albert Iverson, $1,017,000
Seat 7: Johnny Lodden, $500,000
Seat 8: Zoltan Toth, $1,059,000

In what turned out to be a fast-paced final table, Will Fry pulled out the win.

"I thought it would be really cagey early on but to tell the truth, I did think there were a couple of stacks that would be up for grabs. It was definitely faster than I thought though!" Fry said in an interview after his win.

This was Fry's first major live event, and he walks away from it with a €595,839 cash prize and a seat in the EPT Grand Finals. The final-table results were as follows:

Place	Name	Country	Prize
1st	Will Fry	United Kingdom	€595,839
2nd	Ciprian Hrisca	Romania	€342,608
3rd	Martin Jacobson	Sweden	€197,904
4th	Albert Iverson	Denmark	€153,216
5th	Marino Serenelli	Italy	€127,680
6th	Gino Alacqua	Italy	€100,016
7th	Zoltan Toth	Hungary	€78,736
8th	Johnny Lodden	Norway	€53,200

PokerStars had two sponsored pros at the final table as well as an online qualifier. Zoltan Toth is a sponsored pro, as is Johnny Lodden. Lodden has cashed at six EPT events, but this was his first final table.

Martin Jacobson qualified for the EPT Budapest at PokerStars as well. He was one of 157 PokerStars players in the event, including 104 who won their seats online. Of the PokerStars Pros in attendance, Alex Kravchenko pulled out the best finish with his 23rd-place cash.

WSOPC Horseshoe Hammond

The WSOPC also ventured into new territory last week with its first-ever tournament at the Horseshoe Hammond in Indiana. Just 20 minutes from Chicago, the WSOPC main event picked up a crowd of 165 players and a prize pool of $800,250.

While small in comparison to some of the other major poker events, the WSOPC had no shortage of name players. Not only was Dustin Woolf in the mix to pick up a cash in the event, Steve Billirakis was on hand to actually win the event as well.

MrSmokey1 fires up with a WSOPC win.

It was a convincing victory for Billirakis, who held the chip lead at the end of Day 1 and Day 2, and scored a wire-to-wire win at the final table. He came in with the chip lead and when it got down to heads-up against Thomas Koral, he was still in the lead, with about $2.1 million in chips to Koral's $1.2 million.

The two played the first 18 hands of heads-up fairly cautiously, but then the 19th hand did Koral in. Koral was low in chips and raised with 9 9. Billirakis pushed in with A 8 and the flop came J 4 8.

Though Koral still had the lead, Billirakis was looking at a flush draw. The Q on the turn gave him that flush, and Koral's only hope was a T on the river to give him a straight flush.

However, that miracle seems to only happen in movies. A 9 on the river gave Koral a meaningless set, and Billirakis got the win.

"Tom played perfect. I knew he was going to play perfect; I would never expect anything less," Billirakis said in an interview after his win.

"That's what he's been doing the last four or five years; he's just playing tight, playing perfect and just minimizing his losses at all times. He's one of the greatest players in the world that no one's heard of."

Billirakis is a little more well-known than Koral. He gained notoriety in the live tournament world when he became the youngest WSOP bracelet winner in 2007. Now he can add "youngest WSOPC winner" to his resume as well.

The final-table results were:

Place	Name	Hometown	Prize
1st	Steve Billirakis	Chicago	$208,885
2nd	Thomas Koral	Chicago	$126,120
3rd	Gary Leibovitz	Chicago	$80,796
4th	Kyle Schert	Metamora, Ill.	$63,060
5th	George Dietz	Oak Park, Ill.	$49,266
6th	Sameer Al-Dbhany	Frankfort, Ky.	$39,413
7th	Ravi Raghavan	Champaign, Ill.	$31,530
8th	Jason DeWitt	Granger, Ind.	$25,618
9th	Dustin Woolf	Las Vegas	$25,618

More details on these events can be found in the Live Tournaments section. PokerListings is also in Costa Rica to cover the latest Latin America Poker Tour event, and we'll be on the scene in upcoming weeks when the EPT heads to Warsaw and the WSOPC makes a stop in Lake Tahoe.