Travel Report: EPT11 Grand Final, Day 10 -- Nice Finish

Coupla young guns took down the big ones during yesterday’s climactic conclusion of the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo®Casino EPT Grand Final festival, the last EPT stop of Season 11.

Adrian Mateos won the Main and the €1,082,000 that went with it. Mateos won an Estrellas Poker Tour event at 18, the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event at 19, and now an EPT Main Event at 20. He turns 21 right before the WSOP Main Event this year. Charlie Carrel won the €25K High Roller, earning an even bigger prize of €1,114,000. Already an formidable online whiz, Carrel just turned 21 last November.

I spent the day riding out some of the last of the many side events helping making up the 78-tourney sked, including a fairly intriguing €10K Turbo. In that one both Scott Seiver and Dzmitry Urbanovich went deep (again), but Igor Yaroshevskyy ultimately took it down. Seiver placed fourth and Urbanovich third, with the latter sealing up the EPT Season 11 Player of the Year with that finish.

Meanwhile here this morning I finish up my travel reports from the Nice Côte d'Azur International Airport. During these last two weeks we crossed back and forth to Nice several times for dinners, that picture above being right around the border. We’d answer the question “Where are you going for dinner?” with “France.”

The Nice airport is, well, nice, although nearly everything is closed at this early hour. Birds chirp away in the rafters here in the terminal into which the rising sun, still low on the horizon, shines blindingly to make passengers shun the seats facing in that direction.

Speaking of horizons, the WSOP will be coming up soon and indeed a lot of the talk near the end of the festival was about expectations there. Going to both the PCA and EPT Grand Final this year might have affected my perspective somewhat, but I find myself thinking more and more of the EPTs as the “major league” of tournament poker (at least from a global perspective), while the WSOP -- though obviously still the “sun” of the tourney calendar around which all else revolves -- signifies differently.

The announcement this week of the WSOP Europe schedule -- happening in Berlin this time in October -- didn’t seem to be greeted with that much response, and I’ve already heard some talking about EPT Malta (with which it’ll run up against) being a preferred destination then. (I refer, of course, to those who actually have a choice between the two.)

Still, I am looking forward to seeing how things play out in LV. As I sit here amid the chirping birds and rattling of storefronts beginning to open, I miss my LAPT friends down in Panama where that Main Event just got going yesterday.

But I’ve been missing even more Vera and our four-legged friends, where I’m excited to be galloping in later today. Find myself thinking of this song for some reason, even if I’ve been in Monaco, not “Paree” -- and even though I can’t wait to get back on the farm: