Travel Report: EPT13 Malta, Day 4 -- Bojang Brings It

Today’s Italian Poker Tour Malta Main Event finale was kind of wild, especially during the first 45 minutes when the six players who returned were suddenly carved down to just two. In fact, the four knockouts happened within about five hands, including one double-knockout (like on Day 3), which got us thinking it could be over within an hour.

Things did settle down thereafter, with heads-up taking a few hours before at last Ismael Bojang ended up winning the title.

No surprise seeing Bojang do well. Back at the start of this summer’s World Series of Poker I actually picked the German (who lives in Austria) as my favorite to win the WSOP Player of Year. He’d already gathered 32 cashes in four years and as player of mixed games always has a chance to gather lots of POY points. The title was ultimately clinched handily by Jason Mercier, although Bojang did manage to gather nine cashes.

Watching him during heads-up play I tricked myself into thinking occasionally that as a so-called “mixed-game” guy, perhaps Bojang wasn’t quite as dominating or sure of a player when it came to no-limit hold’em. But it didn’t take long to disabuse myself of that notion, as it became evident that pretty much every decision where the results were observable, he was making the right choices.

Bojang’s heads-up opponent, the Italian Francesco Leotta, also played very solidly, it seemed, although perhaps not quite as consistently well as Bojang. Still, luck played a significant role affecting the outcome, as both players were within one card of winning only to see the other draw out a fortunate river card to survive.

We did end up finishing up by around dinner time, so I motored over to help for a couple of hours with the first Day 1 flight of the EPT Main Event before signing off and getting back to the room at a decent hour. Had some other work to do and so actually spend the evening watching NFL football and sweating my Pigskin Pick’em picks, which was kind of nice even though the games that were shown were kind of dreadful (both blowouts).

Will be back at it tomorrow helping with Day 1b of the EPT Malta Main. As always, visit the PokerStars blog to follow along.

Photo: courtesy Manuel Kovsca / PokerStars blog.