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Poker News Round-up: Week #09 EPT Copenhagen winner Jens Kyllonen Photo by Neil Stoddart A tournament packed full of Scandinavians was always likely to be pretty frantic and that proved to be the case at this week’s EPT Copenhagen 50,000 Danish krone main event. A field of 462 reached the money on day two after a steady stream of eliminations including many of the better known names in the event, leaving the door open for one of the many aggressive young Nordic players to make a name for himself. Seven of the eight final tablists were Scandinavians and from that group it was Finland’s Jens Kyllonen who took control of the table. Starting the day as one of the shorter stacks, Kyllonen started accumulating chips and eliminating opponents to build himself a big chip lead by the time he got it heads up against Peter Hedlund of Sweden. Not long into heads up play Hedlund moved all in with AJ but ran into the pocket jacks of Kyllonen which held to give him the title and DKr 6,542,208 (about £790,000.) After the recent withdrawal of the GCBPT from the domestic poker scene, things have now taken an interesting turn with the arrival of a new series of live tournaments. An organization called London Poker Circuit has obtained gambling licenses to host a number of tournaments in hotels around the capital – The Kensington Close hotel and spa, The Westbury in Mayfair and The Kingsway Hall in Covent Garden. Fifteen events have been scheduled at the three hotels between March and November which will be hoping to attract some serious action. Some are week long festivals which will offer £200 and £300 tournaments before a £10,000 high roller game, but others will feature the big buy in game only. Organisers are clearly optimistic that there are plenty of people out there with deep pockets to play £10,000 buy in tournaments on a regular basis but these might just be too regular for their own good. In fact the first two events to open the circuit actually clash with one another – March 16th to 22nd at Kensington Close and March 17th to 18th at The Westbury. Thereafter there are several occasions when £10,000 events are scheduled within days of one another and it’s hard to imagine that these are going to get filled even with the online satellites which will be running. Still, it’s possible that they might catch on and attract interest from overseas, and the smaller buy in tournaments are a certainly a welcome addition to the scene.  Kevin O'Leary One Londoner who will have a healthy roll to play in these if he wants is Kevin “Lovejoy” O’Leary who has been taking the Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza by storm in Las Vegas. Having already won two of the $300 side events, O’Leary also final tabled the $2,000 main event this week and was deservedly named player of the series for his fine performances. Deep stacked tournaments seem to be a speciality for Kevin who also notched wins at the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza and Mega Stack Series at Caesar’s Palace in 2008. Gus Hansen has allegedly been taking a bit of a battering at the high stakes tables on Full Tilt recently, and things didn’t get any better for him when he turned his hand to boxing this week. As a promotional event to launch his new online tv channel Gus TV, Hansen took to the ring to fight fellow Danish player Theo Jorgensen in Copenhagen. Although the match never threatened to turn into a Barrera v Morales style tear up there were a few decent shots thrown and Gus ended up losing on points. Presumably he felt that being punched in the face was an acceptable price to pay to help get his new website off the ground and it seems to have been a success, with servers unable to cope with demand following a huge amount of traffic during the launch show. With any luck this sort of thing might catch on and we get to see more players stepping into the ring. Ram Vaswani versus Roland de Wolfe was actually a potential match up being talked about around eighteen months ago which never got off the ground, but there are surely plenty of other pairings that would prove popular - who wouldn’t want to see Phil Hellmuth versus Mike Matusow? Events to look forward to for next week are the GUKPT Walsall and the conclusion of the LA Poker Classic, as well as the ongoing challenge between Tom Dwan and Patrick Antonius. It has predictably swung back and forth a fair bit so far but Dwan currently holds the lead by around $150,000 after nearly 4000 hands. With pots of over $150,000 having already been played for in the challenge so far though, it’s not a lead that Antonius needs to worry about too much at this stage.
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