Jason Mercier Wins €2K Open-Face Chinese Poker Event at EPT Grand Final
Team PokerStars Pro Jason Mercier broke his 15-month cold streak on Monday by winning the €2,150 Open-Face Chinese Poker event at the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo® Casino EPT Grand Final.
Event #2 of EPT Monaco attracted 52 players and 17 re-entries to create a prize pool of €138,000. The event was running alongside the EPT Grand Final Main Event, forcing several Open-Face Chinese connoisseurs like Barry Greenstein to opt out, but the event was still littered with top pros like Shaun Deeb, Joseph Cheong, David Benyamine, Luke Schwartz and Scott Seiver.
Mercier managed to claim his first win in over a year by besting a tough final table that included fellow Team PokerStars Pros Alex Kravchencko and Victor Ramdin.
Won it #openface €48k and the title. EPT Monte Carlo side event! Sleep time. Main event day 1b in 9 hours!
— Jason Mercier (@JasonMercier)
Mercier collected €48,000 for the title — a small dent in the $1 million goal he set for himself before the year. In February, Mercier revealed that last year was his worst as a poker pro. After dropping close to half-million dollars early in 2012, he was never able to recover, resulting in a major downswing thereafter.
“(The Hendon Mob database) shows that I had $523,587 in tournament cashes for the year ... but I can honestly say that 2012 was pretty brutal for me. It was my first losing year as a professional poker player,” Mercier wrote in a blog for PokerStars.
Mercier's last win came in December 2011 at the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic $100,000 High Roller event. He scooped a $709,767 payday in that tournament after defeating one of the toughest fields of the year.
Mercier's victory on Monday was his second cash of 2013. His other score came at the EPT London Main Event, where he took 25th for $22,572. The victory is a good sign of things to come ahead of the World Series of Poker, where Mercier has won two bracelets and more than $2 million in cashes in his career.
EPT Grand Final Event #2 Final Results
| Place | Player | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jason Mercier | €48,000 |
| 2 | Yakov Onuchin | €30,000 |
| 3 | Alex Klimashin | €19,300 |
| 4 | Victor Ramdin | €12,700 |
| 5 | Alex Kravchencko | €9,300 |
| 6 | Joseph Cheong | €6,800 |
| 7 | Nicolas Ren | €6,000 |
| 8 | Yulius Sepman | €5,400 |
For more information, check out the PokerStars Blog.
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