Sotirios Koutoupas, 29, hails from Thessaloniki, Greece and qualified for the EPT9 Prague Main Event on PokerStars via a €82 satellite. Koutoupas made his presence known in the Main Event on Day 3 when he was one of only three players to bag up over a million in chips.
Koutoupas, who is single, plays primarily big buy-in tournaments on PokerStars under the screen name “SKWINNER” and has more than $190K in earnings. Prior to making the EPT9 Prague final table, Koutoupas’ only live cash was a runner-up finish to Kenny Hallaert in the EPT8 Loutraki €300 No-Limit Hold’em Turbo back in November 2011 for €5,200.
Despite his online success, Koutoupas is still a workingman back home where he works in the family business. Koutoupas is in Prague with his best friend, who was actually with him when he made the final table of the aforementioned EPT8 Loutraki event. “I can’t even imagine,” Koutoupas said when asked what it’d mean to win an EPT title.
Ben Warrington is a 25-year-old professional poker player, originally from Epsom in Surrey and now living primarily in London - when he's not travelling the international poker circuit. After making his mark online, where he won more than $2 million in tournaments alone, he is now focused on establishing himself as a live player. He considers his stellar performance here as evidence that he is getting close to achieving that goal.
Warrington was tournament chip leader after day four and took a steady approach to day five, allowing players to bust around him. "I played very patiently," he said. "And I'm still only one double up from pretty much the chip lead." After a placement in Valencia, while studying Spanish at university, he lived in Spain for a few years before returning to his native UK in June.
He is being supported in Prague by his girlfriend Yuresky, who played the ladies event here after qualifying on PokerStars.
Even though Ramzi Jelassi is still only 26, he is one of the old hands when it comes to the European Poker Tour, having first started on the tour way back in Season 2 when he won a seat online to EPT2 Barcelona. He went deep in two side events at that event and then cashed twice the following season – in Baden and Warsaw.
Since then he has cashed a further nine times in EPT Main Events, including 19th at the EPT6 Grand Final in Monaco for €50,000, and 20th at EPT Barcelona in Season 5 for €24,700. His biggest victories to date though were winning IPT San Remo in 2009 for €170,000 and winning a €2k side event at EPT Prague in Season 5. His live tournament winnings now total more than $1.2 million.
Before taking up poker in 2004, Jelassi was a successful soccer player, participating in the Boy’s Allsvenskan (the highest boy’s league in Sweden) as a 16-year old. This is his deepest EPT Main Event run to date.
Kuzminskiy is a 22-year-old linguistics student from Kemerovo. He first started playing five-card draw at the age of 12 with his younger brother. In 2008 he saw Poker After Dark on TV and start playing NLHE - freerolls, micro-limit MTTs and 6-max turbo SNGs.
In October, he won his seat to Prague in a special EPT Prague Social Networks freeroll for Russian players. This is his first live tournament.
It’s here we go again for Dutch banker David Boyaciyan, who was runner-up here at EPT Prague last season. Boyaciyan, a banker by trade, first took the poker world by storm when he won the Amsterdam Master Classics in November 2011 for €382,200.
Not only had a total unknown bested some of the best players in the world, but he wasn’t even a pro. A month later and he was at it again, finishing second to EPT8 Prague champion Martin Finger. That €535,000 prize is still Boyaciyan’s biggest cash to date but he has also made two WPT Bellagio finals, the Partouche final and finished 11th in the PCA €2k NL Turbo in January.
Boyaciyan, who took a 12-month sabbatical from work this year to focus on poker, won his seat in a €550 live satellite in Prague. He has played all three EPTs this season as well as the WSOP in the summer.
He is married with two children – Joel, 5, and Elina, 2.
It's crunch day at the final EPT of 2012. Just eight players remain of the record breaking 864 players that sat down six long days ago. Ramzi Jealssi is the most experienced EPT player of the final eight and he happens to have the most chips as well.
There are seven other players riding high on confidence as well though who will have something to sat about that. Play is due to start at 12:00 PM CET time and we'll play as long as it takes to crown a winner. This could take a while as the average stack is a 81 big blinds deep.
Coming up we have profiles of all the players so we can get to know them a little better before plays begin.
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