A big Saturday event is always going to be ensure that Wembley Stadium is buzzing with excitement and the Day 2b event at Wembley Stadium for the ISPT Main Event was such an occasion. The two live days prior to this had seen a total of 761 entries for the live events, which was a good thing but there was no doubt that on Saturday, the talk of the event was still about the money that was needed to ensure that the pre-tournament promises would be lived up to.
In the current economic situation, the prize of €1m to the winner was always going to be a big draw but the thing is, there was a lot of doubt about the event going ahead. That was until Dusk Till Dawn stepped in to guarantee the money. This brought a lot of stability to the event but there is no doubt that it placed a large financial element on the company. It is not as if there was a winner takes prize for the poker players, the money dished out to the winner was just 20% of the overall prize pool so there was a big lot of money needed to make everyone happy. At the time of calculating on Saturday morning, it was looking as though DTD needed to find close to €600,000 to ensure that the first prize winner got all the money that was promised to them.
UK poker players got behind the event
It would be fair to say that the UK poker community was fully behind the event. There are always other poker events and tournaments to look out for so it is not as if everyone was able to play in the event but there was definitely a great turnout from some well-known UK names. There was also a big turn out from France, which is not a surprise considering how easy the main transport links between London and France are. There is an element of surprise at the lack of representation from Ireland though. Perhaps the fact that the Irish football team played at Wembley Stadium in midweek meant that there wasn’t the same desire or need to travel back to Wembley so soon! There was also a limited amount of players from Scandinavia at the big Wembley event.
There is usually a strong turn-out from Scandinavian players for major poker events and London is usually a city that they find themselves in on a regular basis. There were some big name Scandinavian poker players like Ramsi Jelassi, Michael Tureniec and Peter Eastgate but there was hope for a lot more than just these players. Perhaps there was not enough international promotion to capture the imagination of players and it may be that Wembley doesn’t hold the same sort of appeal to non-English players as it does for English poker players.
In the Saturday action itself, there had been hopes for the ISPT ambassador, Michael Mizrachi. The player that is known as “The Grinder” got off to a good start, reaching 150,000 chips but this high level disappeared almost as quickly as it came along. Before too long, Mizrachi was struggling on just over 30,000 chips and he was eliminated from the event shortly afterwards.
There was slightly better success for another ambassador for the ISPT, Liz Lieu. She managed to end the day with 70,200 chips, a considerably better amount than renowned poker player James Akenhead. At one point, Akenhead had broken through the 100,000 chips barrier but by the end of the Day 2 action, he found himself back down to the 44,700 level.
Sunday was going to be the final day of the event where the poker action would be played out on the Wembley turn. On Monday, the poker action moves indoors with the Bobby Moore suite being the venue for the climax to the ISPT Wembley event.