High roller and main event titles decided in Deauville
A 5 hour long final table full of swings has now found a winner in the EPT Deauville main event. The high roller tournament has also played down to a finish and it was another frustrating near miss for Martin Jacobsen.
Main event
Going into the final table, big stack Remi Castaignon was the clear favourite to win simply based on the size of his stack (over 40% of the total chips in play.) However, just half an hour into play he handed nearly half of those chips away when he found himself unable to fold when he tangled with Denmark’s Enrico Rudelitz who had worked his way up to be the second biggest stack at that point. Despite the fact that Rudelitz 3 bet out of position pre-flop and then fired on every subsequent street, Castaignon hero called every step of the way with his pocket 5s which had become worth nothing more than a bluff catcher by the end. Unfortunately for him, fourth pair does not beat top set meaning that Rudelitz was the new chip leader and that Castaignon was well on the way to self destructing.
As it happened though, from that point onwards it was Rudelitz who started bleeding chips and Castaignon who started picking them up again. Most notably, Rudelitz lost a significant portion of his chips to Lebanese player Walid Bou Habib after the latter had led out on the river on a paired board with four clubs. Rudelitz pushed in a pile of plaques to re-raise with what most would assume to be a minimum of the ace high flush, only to hate life when Habib moved all in over the top. Making what must surely have been the correct fold, Rudelitz consigned himself to a position from which he would never recover. He ended up finishing fourth whilst Robert Romeo guided his perpetually short stack to just about the best position he could hope for when he finished third.
So that left just Castaignon and Bou Habib, with the Frenchman starting out heads up play with the chip lead once more regained. Castaignon’s liking for a hero call had been his undoing at the start of the final table but he couldn’t resist another when Bou Habib 4 bet all in pre flop and Castaignon managed to make the call with pocket 3s. It was a straight coinflip as Bou Habib showed Kh 8h but there was no help for the player from Lebanon and the title went to Castaignon. He becomes the second French player to win EPT Deauville, and collects a very handy €770,000 in the process.
Final table payouts:
1 Remi Castaignon €770,000
2 Walid Bou Habib €475,000
3 Robert Romeo €275,000
4 Enrico Rudelitz €215,000
5 Franck Kalfon €165,000
6 Joseph El Khoury €125,000
7 Noel Gaens €87,800
8 Jeffrey Hakim €60,000
High roller event
An improvised third day to the high roller event began with the elimination of American players Steven Silverman and Bryn Kenney who were both unable to spin their short stacks up into anything significant. Next to bust was Martin Jacobsen who had started the day as chip leader but lost most of his chips in a pot against Vojtech Ruzicka of the Czech Republic. We didn’t get to see what Jacobsen held but after Ruzicka sprung a surprise check raise on the river of a king high board Jacobsen seemed to realise that whilst he had to fold, that also represented his chance of an EPT title going up in smoke once again as the majority of his chips had been lost without showdown.
From there Ruzicka went on to meet America’s Tim Reilly heads up where it seemed to be going all Reilly’s way until he ran his pocket tens into Ruzicka’s jacks for the biggest pot of the tournament. Reilly had taken a huge hit and to make matters worse he subsequently found soon after that his top pair had run into the flopped straight of Ruzicka to put an end to the tournament.
Final table payouts were as follows:
1 Vojtech Ruzicka €313,000
2 Timothy Reilly €180,000
3 Alexandre Reard €105,700
4 Martin Jacobson €83,200
5 Bryn Kenney €64,100
6 Steven Silverman €47,500
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