Pro/Am Event

Greg "FBT" Mueller began the day with a chip stack over the tournament average by 100,000 and rode it to the final table to win his way into the $20,000 Main Event on September 6th. Twenty players began the day and only a few short stacks which needed early help. With less than 8 big blinds, J.J. Liu was forced to take a shot but was the first elimination.

Elizabeth Indig was the next to exit the tournament followed by league member Tim "Tmay420" West at the hands of Christian "charder30" Harder. As the tournament pushed closer to the paid final table, the pace of play slowed dramatically as the jump from 9th to 10th was steep.

Jeremiah DeGreef was one of three players with a chance to make back-to-back Pro/Am final tables but was unable to pull it off. Matt Marafiotti, Rep Porter, and Ryan Young were also early victims but, as league members, will be able to buy in to the Main Event.

With the elimination of Christian Harder in 11th, the final players were combined to one table where one person would be disappointed. Jaime Kaplan would be the bubble elimination at the hands of Andreas Hoivold. The remaining players were all awarded their Main Event seats and Commissioner Coins.

Even though all players received the same prize no matter their position from 1st through 9th, they decided to play it down to improve their reported results. The top three players were all league members and Greg Mueller would record the official victory after topping Phil Hellmuth and Nam Le.

Brandon Meyers and Sean Getzwiller made some history as they followed up their final table in the Inaugural Pro/Am by making the second event final table as well. Meyers used his entry in August to finish 7th for over $70,000.

All nine players will now return on September 6th to play in the Main Event which will start at noon with an 8-Max format.

Results:

1st - Greg Mueller
2nd - Nam Le
3rd - Phil Hellmuth
4th - Russell Rosenblum
5th - Brandon Meyers
6th - Sean Getzwiller
7th - Andreas Hoivold
8th - Jeremy Ausmus
9th - Jaime Kaplan

Pro/Am Interview with Greg Mueller




Pro/Am Christian Harder Elimination




Pro/Am Wrap Up

Written by Michael Craig

When play concluded at Epic Poker’s second Pro/Am last Saturday at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, Greg Mueller held the chip lead. Later that evening, playing craps with friends at Aria, someone robbed him of $5,000. Greg is known throughout poker not just for his friendly disposition, his needling sense of humor, and pair of World Series of Poker bracelets, but also as an elite professional athlete. The amiable giant from Vancouver also played professional hockey in Europe for nearly a decade. He and a buddy pursued the thief through the casino, trapping him maze of slot machines. When Mueller barked, “Ship the flag!”, the culprit quickly complied.

The next day, he proved similarly protective of his chip lead and won the Pro/Am. During Sunday’s play, he described his strategy in both tournament poker and in thwarting theft.

Mueller was shooting craps at the crowded table with friends Kyle, Shawn, and others, when Kyle interrupted Greg’s lively, humorous banter: “Count your flags.” He had some red-white-and-blue $5,000-denomination chips (“flags”) at the edge of his stack on the craps-table rail, which Kyle saw “shake.”

After counting and doing the mental math about chips he and Shawn Buchanan had exchanged across the table, declared, “I think I’m missing one.” When they saw a suspicious character – Shawn had earlier noticed him and made sure to keep track of his girlfriend Tina’s purse – walk away from the table and, turning the corner around a bank of slot machines, sprint away, Greg yelled, “That guy grabbed a chip!”

Greg and Kyle bolted from the table, taking different directions among the bank of slot machines. “He was zigging and sagging. He turned to me, saw me, and went the other way. My buddy went to grab him and got ahold of him – ripped the shirt right off him. The guy kept going.”

Finally, the pair trapped the thief and Kyle pushed him down. Mueller said, “Ship the flag and nothing happens to you. I won’t press charges. I don’t knock you out. Just ship the flag.” He handed over the chip.

Greg was willing to keep his word, but at that moment, eight security guards arrived and took over. He completes the story without boasting, though the effect is like the Terminator pulling off his skin to reveal the steel beneath: “I’m not very quick as far as a sprint goes, but I will not stop. He wants to run to LA – I’ll chase him down.”

Was it really a surprise, therefore, that Greg Mueller won the Pro/Am? He never relinquished his chip lead, and went on to win when the nine Main Event seat winners played to a conclusion to honor and Global Poker Index points.

Written by Michael Craig

On Sunday, September 4, at 5:20 PM, Norwegian poker pro Andreas Hoivold busted Jaime Kaplan, a superb and accomplished online poker professional, in tenth place in the second Epic Poker League Pro/Am at the Key West room at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. The remaining nine players won seats in Tuesday’s $20,000 Main Event. Ninety-seven players entered the $1,500 Pro/Am on Friday and Saturday, and there are at least that many unlikely stories about the event and its competitors.

Every hand of poker makes someone unhappy. With nine seats for ninety-seven entries, even with a generous overlay, the ratio always favors the unhappy. On Sunday evening, the winners had to check their bodies and, more often, their psyches, for wounds.

In this event, the bubble lasted over two hours. The winner was the victim, and then the avenger, of a robbery. A dead stack sprang to life and won a seat. One player, down to two big blinds, clung to the slimmest reed of hope by winning a four-way all-in with ace-seven. When the tournament director declared the event over and the seats awarded, the competitors refused to stop playing. Finally, the unhappiest man, whose elimination in tenth place sparked a celebration by everyone else in the room, obtained a reprieve and a seat in the Main Event.

Welcome to Epic Poker League’s Event 2, where everyone associated has borne a month of slings and arrows, and the Main Event hasn’t even started.

LABOR DAY EQUALS OVERLAY

Epic Poker made good on its promise to award nine $20,000 Main Event seats, even though the prize pool totaled enough for six-and-a-half seats. It was a difficult week on the schedule, recognized as such by Epic from the start: little time to run satellites, the European tour underway, the WinStar event, Labor Day weekend. The players were two-and-a-half seats to the good from the start.

Over forty players won satellites into the first Pro/Am, and two of them won Main Event seats. This time, only fifteen satellite winners competed, and none won seats. On this occasion, League members had greater success than in Event 1 (though they scarcely could have had less, with only Andy Bloch succeeding at winning a seat among sixty-eight League members playing the first Pro/Am). For Event 2, three Epic Poker League members won seats:

Greg Mueller
Phil Hellmuth
Nam Le

With the ratio of seats awarded at 9/97, however, “Pros” (3/37) continued to underperform “Ams” (6/60).

The following six non-League members will take their places in the field on Tuesday:

Jeremy Ausmus
Sean Getzwiller
Andreas Hoivold
Jaime Kaplan
Brandon Meyers
Russell Rosenblum

PHIL HELLMUTH ARRIVES LATE, STAYS LATER

When Phil Hellmuth reviewed League requirements with Annie Duke, he decided Day 1a of Event 2, last Friday, was the best day to fulfill his obligation to play a Pro/Am. He decided this, however, shortly before the close of registration and nearly two hours before he could physically begin playing. In this instance, Hellmuth’s very late entrance was neither theatrical nor part of a psychological ploy. He wouldn’t admit it as such, but it was the most convenient time to all but sacrifice $1,500 to meet the League requirement.

All but sacrifice.

The blinds and antes had attacked Phil’s absent stack like locusts by the time he arrived just before the dinner break. “I like to win,” he explained two nights later when asked about his intensity – he had just laid down pocket queens toward the end of a short-stacked charity event – and demonstrated the basis for the truism that poker players are, above all, competitors.

Hellmuth was not going to relinquish his final chips without a fight. He doubled up, gained the room to maneuver, and made it to the end of Day 1a. He demonstrated once again why he is poker’s greatest escape artist, with an unlimited faith in himself that causes him to make unbelievable statements about his ability and sometimes deliver.

In fact, he sparked the movement to play on for GPI points after the nine Main Event seats were rewarded. (The Pro/Am event qualified for GPI scores but with all nine players receiving the same prize, each would receive a ninth-place score.) Eight of the nine agreed, and Phil finished third after spirited action, losing with ace-queen to Greg Mueller’s ace-king, leaving Greg and Nam Le to battle out the final place. He repeated with another great performance Sunday night in the charity event, finishing runner-up while serving as the second-half emcee and commentator.

DON’T MESS WITH GREG MUELLER

Greg Mueller seems happy in the role of a big, amiable clown, one of those stereotypically good-natured Canadians with an ever-present smile and joke. On the other hand, his chatter inevitably includes hints of insults and challenges, targeted at his opponents’ minds. That’s when you notice the smile can disappear, replaced by a jaw set firm enough that you can see it clench from the pulsing at the sides of his shaved head. That’s the guy who played professional hockey for nearly a decade and could probably still knock down a telephone booth, if any exist.

With the ability to move seamlessly between predator and comic, perhaps this was a typical weekend for Mueller. He played Saturday, Day 1b, and finished the day as the combined Day 1 chip leader. Relaxing with friends and shooting craps at Aria, his friend Kyle ended his buoyant, humorous patter at the crowded table when he told Greg, “Count your flags.”

Mueller had some red-white-and-blue $5,000-denomination chips (“flags”) at the edge of his stack on the craps-table rail. Aria was hopping and Kyle saw his flags “shake.” He counted and, after doing the mental math about chips he and Shawn Buchanan, his other friend at the table, had exchanged, declared, “I think I’m missing one.” When they noticed a suspicious character – Shawn had earlier noticed him and was watching his girlfriend’s purse – walk away from the table and, turning the corner around a bank of slot machines, sprint away, Greg yelled, “That guy grabbed a chip!”

Greg and Kyle bolted from the table, taking different directions among the maze of slot machines. “He was zigging and sagging. He turned to me, saw me, and went the other way. My buddy went to grab him and got ahold of him, ripped the shirt right off him. The guy kept going.”

Finally, the pair trapped the thief and Kyle pushed him down. Mueller said, “Ship the flag and nothing happens to you. I won’t press charges. I don’t knock you out. Just ship the flag.” He handed over the chip.

Greg was willing to keep his word, but at that moment, eight security guards arrived and took over. He completes the story without boasting, though the effect is like the Terminator pulling off his skin to reveal the steel beneath: “I’m not very quick as far as a sprint goes, but I will not stop. He wants to run to LA – I’ll chase him down.”

Was it really a surprise, therefore, that Greg Mueller won the Pro/Am? He never relinquished his chip lead, and went on to win when they continued for points and honor.

PERILOUS JOURNEYS OF SEAN GETZWILLER AND BRANDON MEYERS

Seven of the nine Pro/Am winners from Event 1 returned to Event 2. Clifford Waite, Dan Fleyshman, and Andy Bloch went out on Friday; Micah Raskin exited Saturday. Jeremiah DeGreef, Brandon Meyers, and Sean Getzwiller made the final twenty on Sunday. None of the three had large stacks. When Jeremiah joined the exodus preceding the final war of attrition, only Brandon and Sean retained hopes of repeating. When Sean tripled up his short stack with jack-jack in the big blind, he nudged away from the bubble.

That put Brandon Meyers in the crosshairs. He was the shortest stack and couldn’t find even a reasonable opportunity to make a stand. For Meyers, the seat was effectively more valuable because, due to his ninth place finish in Event 1 he may be on the bubble for the $1 million freeroll for the League Championship. Unlike sixteen of the other seventeen players in the money, Brandon (like Dan Fleyshman) can enter Events 2, 3, or 4 only by running the gauntlet of the Pro/Am.

With the bubble seemingly galvanized, his stack dwindled to just 7,500 – when they were playing 1,500-3,000 blinds, 500 antes. With less than three big blinds and ace-seven-offsuit, Meyers fended off a four-way all-in and quadrupled up.

JAIME KAPLAN’S OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE

The worst place to finish in any tournament is one from the money. In a satellite-type competition, it is even more painful when you finish one place short. The last to fall misses out not on a small, well-earned amount of money but the same reward as the chip leader receives. In both situations, however, the absolute bottom of the experience is the moment of elimination: your failure not only looms massive but is the cause of instant, sometimes wild and joyous, celebration of everybody else in the vicinity.

Jaime Kaplan knows the drill. He has only recently been playing live tournaments but, until April 2011, was one of the great online tournament poker performers. He won an event at PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) in 2010 and, in 2009, finished fifth in one of the richest-ever online tournaments, earning $482,400.

When Kaplan became the shortest stack following Meyers’s quadruple-up, he knew he would have to find a hand and hope. With queen-deuce and three limpers on his big blind, a flop of ace-queen-four gave him a pair of queens and the last chance he would likely get with as much as a decent pair. He moved in his few remaining chips, only to find that Andreas Hoivold limped with ace-three, for a pair of aces. By the time the second of two meaningless nines joined the community cards, the players and spectators joined in the spontaneous expression that inevitably takes place at the loser’s expense: joy, relief, surprise, exultation, celebration, and congratulations.

In less time than Jaime Kaplan’s feelings at the spectacle could be measured, he had disappeared. The instant he lost, he ducked under the rope surrounding the table and quickly made the most miserable walk in poker.

First place, $20,000 seat. Second place, $20,000 seat. Third place, $20,000 seat. Fourth place, $20,000 seat. Fifth place, $20,000 seat. Sixth place, $20,000 seat. Seventh place, $20,000 seat. Eighth place, $20,000 seat. Ninth place, $20,000 seat. Tenth place, zero.

Top online tournament players can manage ten or twenty tournaments simultaneously. Such a player can experience thousands of tournaments in a year, more than Phil Hellmuth in five careers. But Jaime couldn’t have imagined this ending.

On Monday evening, Commissioner Annie Duke reached Kaplan with a reprieve. Michael Divita had withdrawn from playing in Main Event 2. According to League rules, the tenth place finisher – Jaime – would be awarded the final Pro/Am seat for the Main Event on Tuesday.

These are the other four seat winners who will join Jaime Kaplan, Greg Mueller, Phil Hellmuth, Sean Getzwiller, and Brandon Meyers in the field on Tuesday afternoon:

NAM LE

Nam turns thirty-one next Saturday. Having earned over $6 million in his twenties, this three-year card member would consider victory on Friday a wonderful birthday present, but not an unprecedented result. He has cashed a dozen times for six or seven figures (including second place and first place in a pair of massive WPT events in 2006 and 2008). This could be the second tournament he wins the day before his birthday. On September 9, 2008, he won the High-Roller event in Macau, worth over $473,000.

RUSSELL ROSENBLUM

Russell, forty-one, has earned over $1.2 million in tournament poker in the past decade, including sixth place at the WSOP Main Event in 2002 and fifth place at the WPT Championship in 2004. Rosenblum is part of the Las Vegas community of professional gamblers on the lam from a combination of the legal profession (he was a D.C. lawyer), entrepreneurship (he started and sold, during the Internet bubble, an online business), and trading in financial instruments (I haven’t gotten confirmation but I believe he was part of Susquehanna International Group, the brilliant group of securities traders with poker embedded in its culture and employees and alums including Matt Hawrilenko, Rep Porter, Bill Chen, Jared Ankenman, and King Yao.) Russell has been a great supporter of the League and only a long-scheduled vacation kept him from playing the first Pro/Am.

JEREMY AUSMUS

Jeremy busted two players on the first hand of the Pro/Am and never looked back. Like Brandon Meyers and Sean Getzwiller, Ausmus is just starting to find his place at the top of tournament poker in 2011. He finished third in the Big Event in LA in March for $190,000 and cashed four times at the World Series.

ANDREAS HOIVOLD

Jennifer Newell interviewed Hoivold during a break in play on Saturday, so he will be the subject of a future Player to Watch feature. (Jennifer’s ability to lead her interview subjects to successful results is uncanny.) I hope to get to know Andreas better during this event but I can’t rival the description that appears on Poker Royalty’s web site. When his biography says, “Andreas’ story is like no other poker player,” that’s not hyperbole.

In 1994 just before Andreas was about to start training to become a police officer he was involved in a car collision which left him in a coma and ultimately prison. Tragedy continued to follow Andreas after his release from jail when his baby son died from sudden infant death syndrome. Poker then entered his life and Andreas’ luck suddenly took a dramatic upswing. A win in a regional Norwegian Championship won him a ticket to the Nordic Challenge, which again he won and in addition to the prize money was a ticket to the Poker Million in which he finished 3rd and cashed for $250,000. Andreas’ abilities combined with his unique outlook on life and affable manner secured him sponsorship with Ladbrokes, and he won the EPT Dortmund Main Event for $880k in his first event for them. In 2009 Andreas was crowned the Norwegian H.O.R.S.E Champion. He has appeared on numerous European Poker TV shows and made his debut on Season 6 High Stakes Poker in 2010.

If the ride has been this rocky so far, not just for Andreas but for Jamie, Greg, Phil, Sean, Brandon, and the others and the Main Event hasn’t even started, keep your seat belts fastened. Event 2 of Epic Poker’s first season promises another rough road and thrilling finish.