Valentin Messina's Zen Journey; Online to the Main Event

Valentin Messina is an online poker professional and poker coach from France who has had plenty of success crossing over into live tournament poker. A household name on the French poker scene, Messina is making waves in the North American poker world for the first time here in the Main Event.

Messina’s first recorded tournament result listed is a first-place finish in the €1,000 France Poker Tour Season 5 Grand Final for $189,146. By far the greatest live cash of Messina’s career came in March of 2015 when he took second in the €5,300 EPT Malta for a payday of $665,268. That finish brought Messina’s live earnings over $1,000,000 and sent him up the rankings on France’s all-time money list. He is currently 43rd on that list. Messina will have to get through some fellow French pros on that list to win the Main Event. Antoine Saout, Benjamin Pollak, and Alexandre Reard are all still in the field with only 18 players remaining.

Messina has played the Main Event seven times, but this will be his first time cashing in it. While he has played other bracelet events in years passed, this year Messina came with one focus: to play (and win) the Main Event. The fact that he qualified for the tournament in a $750 online qualifier made it that much easier. Before this run, he had nine WSOP cashes beginning in 2013 for a total of $74,848. With $340,000 already locked up in the Main Event, Messina will be adding significantly to his WSOP earnings with this run.

We got a chance to talk to Messina’s longtime girlfriend Johanna Bremont on the rail. What has the experience been like for them, as Messina goes deeper in the tournament?

“For us, it’s incredible. I have a lot of stress. He is okay. He’s zen and cool, but me, very very stressed for him, for us.”

Bremont said that Messina has remained relaxed throughout the Main Event, relying on his ten years of experience playing live, and they are both enjoying the experience very much.

“He wants to win. He wants the final table, so he fights for this.” She added, “He will be very disappointed if he makes mistakes, so he’s very focused.”

His journey through this Main Event has appeared quite smooth leading up to Day 7 as he managed to finish in the top ten percent of the field in four of the first six days of the tournament. He played Day 1b and finished with 159,900, good for 157th overall of the 5,519 that advanced. He more than doubled his stack on Day 2ab, finishing 92nd out of 2,572. He nearly doubled his stack again on Day 3 to 679,000, good for 125th of 1,084.

Messina’s Day 4 was a big one as he multiplied his stack by more than four, going from 679,000 to 2,979,000. He finished that day tenth in chips out of 297. He added around 2 million more chips to his stack on Day 5 to finish 30th out of 85, and he had a well-above average Day 6 when he went from around five million to more than 28 million chips by the end of the day, putting him second behind Christian Pham in the counts coming into Day 7.

Plans for the winnings? While they’re not counting the money yet with so much more play left, Messina and Bremont have hopes of buying a house, perhaps in Mexico, and investing in real estate around the world with some of the winnings.

“For the moment, we live in Malta, but we want to move, so maybe it’s the moment.”

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