The field of the European Poker Tour (EPT) Monte Carlo Main Event needed to go from just 120 players to 111 on Tuesday’s Day 3 in order for the money bubble to burst. That clearly happened – otherwise it would have been the slowest day in major tournament history – as the field stood at just 45 as the chips were bagged for the night. And it was David Peters who, once again, was the chip leader, finishing with 1.839 million chips.
Peters is a tremendous player, but even the best need some luck on their side every so often. In the mid-afternoon, Peters was on the hot end of a cooler (see what I did there?) that elevated his stack to one of complete dominance. If this happened online, people would be crying, “RIGGED!” on the message boards. Peters was dealt pocket Aces, Lukasz Cygan was given Kings, and Randy Lew had pocket Queens. Aces versus Kings versus Queens. Needless to say, all the chips got in the pot. The board ended up low and Peters stacked up loads of chips while Cygan and Lew hit the rail.
That took Peters up to 1.65 million chips, nearly what he ended the day with, when the average stack was barely over a quarter million. Nobody else had broken the million chip mark at that point in the tournament. Keep in mind, as well, that the blinds were just 2,500/5,000.
Big tournaments are not often without controversy and EPT Monte Carlo was no exception. According to the PokerStars blog, the players at Pierre Morin’s table called tournament officials over to complain that Morin was taking an inordinate amount of time for each decision. Apparently, the players said that he would wait until there were 15 seconds remaining on the shot clock, no matter what.
Tournament Director Luca Vivaldi told him, “The shot clock is to speed up the game. Not for you to avoid timing tells.”
Morin could not have cared less, saying, “I don’t want to speed up the game, sorry!”
Eventually, the tournament director told Morin that his time to act was being reduced from 30 seconds to 10 seconds. No matter, Morin won the very next hand.
As we mentioned yesterday, David Peters is quite familiar with this stage of live tournaments. He has over $20.5 million in live tournament earnings, not to mention another $5.2 million in online tournaments. He has earned one World Series of Poker bracelet and has made the top ten in four World Poker Tour events. Peters ranks 15th on the all-time live tournament money list and fifth on the Global Poker Index.
45th place pays €13,600 and while that is a lot of money, that’s a drop in the bucket for David Peters. He likely has his sights set much higher. Perhaps the €712,000 first prize?
