This is genial French player Nicolas Levi’s second final table of Season 8 - and third EPT final overall. Last December, Levi finished third at EPT Prague for €270,000 and in Season 3, he made the final of EPT Dortmund, finishing seventh place for € 85,700. Levi came across poker quite by accident, seven years ago, while he was studying computer science in the UK. On his laptop, Levi discovered “a totally different game, a mix of psychology and mathematics”. He said: “From the very first hand, I thought ‘this is the game for me’. Beating chance seemed a very exciting challenge.” Since then, Levi has become a regular on the international poker scene, and is never seen without his signature trilby hat. Outside of the EPT, Levi has achieved numerous other deep runs; his four WSOP finals include fifth in the 2010 WSOPE Main Event for £208,119 and sixth in the $10,000 Pot-Limit Hold'em Championship for $114.525. Levi been based in the UK since 2000 – and in London for the last four years.
Duval’s full-time job is studying for a Business degree at Université Laval, and he's just one session away from finishing up. In his spare time, though, he plays poker — live cash and online MTTs. At the prodding of his friend Yann Dion, Duval bought into a direct entry satellite for this tournament on PokerStars, and a win there allowed him to secure his seat and join Dion here at EPT Madrid. Four days later, he's sitting at the final table with a real shot at the trophy and some serious bragging rights back home. He'll begin the final day with 963,000 chips. It's his first ever event on the EPT circuit and the largest live tournament he's played. Duval also won the EPT Madrid Skrill Last Longer Contest.
This is the first season that Ilan Boujenah has played on the European Poker Tour but he has certainly made his mark. Two small cashes at EPT San Remo and EPT Deauville hinted at a player that had the talent to go further, but would his fiery temperament serve to be his Achilles heel? While the Israeli has been quick to flip between courteous and argumentative, much to the dismay of the floor staff, his mercurial play over the last four days has proved that he deserves to be at this final table. Boujenah won $562,405 last year and you can expect to see - and hear - more of him over the next couple of seasons
High stakes cash game pro Andrei Stoenescu bust Mike ‘Timex’ McDonald to set the final table after winning a huge 1.9m flip with his big slick flopping Broadway against the Canadian’s flopped set of tens. The board failed to pair and McDonald was sent to the rail.
Although this is only the second EPT Stoenescu has ever played, he is far from a poker novice. Stoenescu’s daily online grind is at the $5/$10NL up to $50/$100NL tables and his best online tournament score was for $115,000 when he chopped a Sunday major heads up. He went on to win. Stoenescu aims to become the first Romanian EPT winner.
Rap star Bruno “Kool Shen” Lopes is one of those rare people who seems to excel in every thing they do. As a teenager, he was an outstanding football player and nearly turned pro when he was offered the chance to play for the town of Lens. He said: “I didn’t do it. I went to New York instead.” At the time, Lopes was the National Breakdance Champion of France and for next three years, he and his friends made a living busking as breakdancers and graffiti artists. In 1987, Lopes formed NTM – originally as a graffiti group then as a rap outfit. “Kool Shen” became a major star and the group went double-platinum. Lopes’ hit “Un Ange dans Le Ciel” has had more than five million hits on YouTube.
Lopes first started playing poker (five-card draw) when he was 13. He then forgot all about poker for 25 years until he saw it on television in 2005. He began playing EPTs in Season 5 and min-cashed EPT San Remo. The following year, he cashed in San Remo again, and then had a deep run at the EPT6 Grand Final, finishing 42nd for €30,000. His biggest cash was in January when he beat a 108-strong field at the 2012 EFOP in Paris for €100,000. He was an overnight chip leader at EPT Deauville a few days later, eventually finishing 73rd for €11,000. Last month he came seventh at WPT Mauritius. His live tournament winnings now total nearly $400,000 but he still earns his main living from music. This is his fifth EPT Main Event cash.
Fraser MacIntyre is very much a veteran when it comes to poker; he's been playing it as a hobby for about 20 years but the last two has seen him become a semi-professional player. The rest of the time, he runs a pub and nightclub in his home town of Ayr. He plays online cash games and satellites as well as live tournaments, his previous biggest cash was winning a WSOPE side event in Cannes last year for €16,900. MacIntyre qualified for Madrid through PokerStars’ Step satellites and has also won a seat to LAPT Sao Paulo. He's been supported back home by his wife and four kids and here in Madrid by his friend, Mike Hill, a fellow player.
Frederik Jensen is a regular face on the international poker circuit and had marked himself out as one of the game’s rising stars in 2010 with an EPT Vilamoura final table, a runner-up spot in the Aussie Millions and 3rd place finish in a major EPT Grand Final side event totalling $1.3m. Last year, however, was somewhat less fruitful on the live circuit with just $115,013 of cashes. This final table should kick start Jensen’s 2012 giving the solid tournament pro his second shot at an EPT title. Jensen is also an internet pro, playing as “Fred_Brink” and won the PokerStars Sunday Million in 2008 for $204,000
Ibañez is a 34-year-old welder from Leon who decided to enter EPT Madrid on a whim. “I follow my heart, not my head,” he said. He rarely plays online but does play live cash games and tournaments as a hobby. He has been playing poker for a few years and his biggest cash before making the EPT Madrid final was in a tournament in Salamanca for around €3,000.
Good morning one more time from Spain, and welcome back to the PokerStars.comEPT Madrid Main Event. Today is the closing day of the event, and from 477 starting players, we're left with just eight.
Spain's Ricardo Ibañez is your big stack coming into this final table, working his magic yesterday to bag up an impressive 3.216 million chips. That's close to twice the average and has him sitting pretty with nearly 25% of the chips in play.
Bios of the players will follow this post, so we'll leave most of the introductions there. It is, however, worth a special mention to the two remaining Frenchmen, Bruno Lopes and Nicolas Levi. Levi is a regular on the tour who's sitting at his third EPT final table. Just last December, he finished 3rd place in Prague, and he's earned more than $1.5 million in his poker career. Lopes has likely earned much more than that in his professional career where he's better known by his stage name, Kool Shen. His story is definitely worth a read, but suffice it to say he's more than your average celebrity-turned-poker-player, and he's got a real chance to win this thing with his fifth-place stack to start.
The cards are scheduled to go in the air in just about a half hour, and we'll give you some more info on the remaining players in between now and then. So sit back, relajate, and enjoy the final table of EPT Madrid.
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