If somebody asked you to name a country that is synonymous with the game of poker you would probably answer the United States of America and one of the last countries you would think of would probably be Belgium but that could be all set to change after EPT Snowfest gets completed later today.
Over the course of four long days of poker the 482 players have been whittled down to the final table of eight and of those eight, three of them are from Belgium! Leading the way is Kevin Vandersmissen who has somehow manage to turn his 30,000 starting stack from Day 1 into a staggering 4,512,000 chips, which is almost double of his nearest rival, Cristian Dragomir and means that if the bottom four stacks combined he would still be leading!
He obviously ran good during the last couple of days but he has also been playing extremely well and will be the odds on favourite when play resumes at 1400 local time at the Alpine Palace Hotel in Saalbach-Hinterglemm. He already has over $440,000 winnings from live poker tournaments and is guaranteed to take home no less than €35,000 today though I think he would be bitterly disappointed with anything less than the €390,000 first place prize.
The other two Belgian players who will be seated with him, Philip Meulyzer and Koen De Visscher each have 1,758,000 and 1,543,000 respectively, meaning that the Belgian contingent hold 7,813,000 of the 14,460,000 chips in play, a quite amazing statistic.
Although it is highly likely that Vandersmissen will walk away with the lion's share of the spoils my personal favourite for the title is Vladimir Geshkenbein, a talented Russian player better known as “Beyne” in online poker circles. Geshkenbein is a hyper-aggressive player who is almost impossible to put on a hand and the fact that he sits drinking vodka and lemon or Jagermeister and Red Bull all day long makes him a hero in my book! His best live tournament result was a couple of years ago when he won the APPT High Roller event for $266,705 after defeating 10-time WSOP bracelet winner Johnny Chan heads up.
When play resumes at 1400 local time they will play out the remainder of Level 24 which means the blinds will be 15,000/30,000/3,000a. There will be no re-draw for seats as they did this when the final nine players were consolidated onto one table towards the end of play yesterday.
Final table seating plan complete with official chip counts
Seat 1: Kevin Vadersmissen – 4,512,000
Seat 2: Giacomo Maisto – 986,000
Seat 3: Vladimir Geshkenbein – 1,678,000
Seat 4: Philip Meulyzer – 1,758,000
Seat 5: Denis Murphy – 997,000
Seat 6: Morten Mortensen – 740,000
Seat 7: Cristian Dragomir – 2,293,000
Seat 8: Koen De Visscher – 1,543,000
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