Artem Litvinov opened for 105,000 from the hijack and received a call from Ludovic Lacay, who held in the cutoff. The button got out of the way, and then Adrian Piasecki three-bet to 290,000 from the small blind with . The big blind folded, Litvinov did the same, and Lacay followed suit after thinking about it for a few moments.
Jason Tompkins raised to 100,000 from under the gun and it folded all of the way around to Ludovic Lacay in the big blind. Lacay called and the flop came down . Lacay checked and Tompkins opted to check right behind.
The came down on the turn and Lacay took this opportunity to lead out for 150,000. Tompkins flat called and the hit the river. Lacay fired 175,000 for one last bet and Tompkins tanked for about a minute before finally calling.
Lacay showed for a pair of jacks and Tompkins flashed his before mucking his hand.
With this pot Lacay has overtaken Jason Lavallee as the chip leader.
Coming in as the short stack today, Russian player Artem Litvinov is an EPT regular with five Main Event cashes to his name already, including 16th at EPT8 Deauville for €26,000. Litvinov works in marketing but plays a lot of high stakes poker, both live and online. He first started playing poker about seven years ago. His best result to date was in April when he outlasted players such as Phil Ivey, Alex Bilokur and Martin Finger to finish fifth in the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo®Casino EPT Grand Final High Roller for €216,000. His live tournament winnings already total nearly $500,000 – but would have been €122,960 more if he hadn’t bubbled the Super High Roller at EPT Barcelona. Online, he also has a string of tidy results including third in a $2k SCOOP NL event for $206,784 and third in a WCOOP event for $144,808.
Angelo Recchia hails from San Vito dei Normanni, Brindisi and first started playing poker six years ago in online heads up SNGs and MTTs. His first live experience was in 2010 competing in the PokerStars.it All Stars Of Poker; he finished sixth for €12,000. Recchia graduated in linguistics, then did military service and worked as a barman all around Italy before becoming a poker pro. His best live result to date was winning a €1,000 IPT Sanremo side event in January for €32,000. He also has several other smaller cashes to his name from the PCA, WSOP and Eureka Poker Tour. Online, he came fifth in the PokerStars.it Sunday Special for almost €10,500 and third in the PokerStars.it Sunday High Roller for around €6,500.
Ismael Bojang, 23, has been playing poker for five years now. A former Economics student at Göttingen University, Bojang is mainly a live cash and tournament player and plays very little online. This is a decision that he puts down to the entertainment value. It’s more fun to play live, he says, with fewer distractions. Living in Hamburg, he regularly travels to France and Austria to play Omaha cash games.
Despite this he still plays the occasional PokerStars tournament on a Sunday but it’s live poker that has brought him the most success, including four cashes at this year’s World Series of Poker. To date his live tournament earnings amount to nearly $400,000.
Jason Lavallee is a 26-year old professional poker player from Montreal, Quebec. Though he generally plays a mixture of both tournaments and cash games, Lavallee has heightened his focus on tournament play as of late. Lavallee had his first major tournament cash back in 2007, but he earned his greatest tournament cash by finishing in 2nd place in the $15,000 World Poker Tour Championship event at Festa al Lago for $795,150. Since then Lavallee has been able to bring his total tournament winnings up to an impressive $1,055,312. Winning today will give Lavallee the biggest tournament score of his life and he is in a good position to do so as he is the biggest stack at the table.
Micah Raskin is a 44-year-old businessman from New York, USA, who has become a regular fixture on the international poker circuit. He has amassed more than $1.1 million in live tournament winnings during a relatively brief career at the tables, and is now at his first EPT final table. He grew up in Queens, New York, where he learned poker from his father, Tommy while playing in the basement of his family home with his twin brothers. The twins - Logan and Roger - are here in Sanremo and have been supporting Raskin from the rail throughout the tournament.
in the cutoff. The button got out of the way, and then Adrian Piasecki three-bet to 290,000 from the small blind with 
. The big blind folded, Litvinov did the same, and Lacay followed suit after thinking about it for a few moments.
![[user196676]](/img/avatars/avatar.svg){kind=avatar}
. Lacay checked and Tompkins opted to check right behind.
came down on the turn and Lacay took this opportunity to lead out for 150,000. Tompkins flat called and the 
hit the river. Lacay fired 175,000 for one last bet and Tompkins tanked for about a minute before finally calling.
for a pair of jacks and Tompkins flashed his 
before mucking his hand.
