"Redbull" Robbie Thompson has just welcomed all of the eight final tablists and it was Lucille Cailly who drew the largest cheer from the crowd.
We have rolled back the level to the start of Level 30.
Shuffle Up and Deal!
"Redbull" Robbie Thompson has just welcomed all of the eight final tablists and it was Lucille Cailly who drew the largest cheer from the crowd.
We have rolled back the level to the start of Level 30.
Shuffle Up and Deal!
The end of Season 8 is almost upon us, but what a way to go out in style. We are of course at the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo? Casino European Poker Tour Grand Final and we have two more events to go. The €25,000 High Roller attracted a mind boggling 133 entries thus creating our third €1 million prize at just this event alone. That event pulls into Day 2 today and you can follow all of the action here on PokerNews.
But the star of the show is the EPT Grand Final itself. We are down to the final eight players and we expect it to be a whizz, bang whallop of a final. Yesterday's play lasted so long that of the returning cast seven players have fewer than 30BB. For the second time this season we have a player in his sixties going for an EPT title. Bernard Guigon first blipped on the EPT radar when he was the unfortunate bubble boy at Season 7 EPT Deauville. Guigon starts as the runaway chip leader with 4,900,000.
Also in the line up is our first ever Grand Final lady, Lucille Cailly. If yesterday is anything to go by then we expect Cailly to have the fervent support on the rail with the French support being the most vocal.
The action starts at 13:30 (CET) but we will be bringing you the action with a 60-minute delay. The delayed action, complete with hole cards and commentary, can be found at Pokerstars.tv (EPTlive) or alternatively you can follow the live updates right here with the usual team.
In the meantime here is the table draw, chip counts and player profiles.
Table | Seat | Name | Chips |
---|---|---|---|
Final Table | 1 | Rodrigo Caprioli | 2,945,000 (29BB) |
2 | Bernard Guigon | 4,900,000 (49BB) | |
3 | Michael Dietrich | 1,550,000 (15BB) | |
4 | Sergio Castellucci | 1,410,000 (14BB) | |
5 | Moshin Charania | 2,215,000 (22BB) | |
6 | Daniel Gomez | 2,665,000 (26BB) | |
7 | Clayton Mozdzen | 1,430,000 (14BB) | |
8 | Lucille Cailly | 2,865,000 (28BB) |
Caprioli is a PokerStars SuperNova Elite who bought into this year’s EPT Grand Final using FPPs – 850,000 of them! He has been playing poker since he was 12, and professionally since 2005. Like Team PokerStars Pros Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier and Dario Minieri before him, Caprioli says he’s in line to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from PokerStars – a stunning personalized TAG Heuer watch for reaching 5,000,000 lifetime VPPs (VIP Player Points). The watches are inscribed with the players’ user IDs and the date they hit five million. Online, Caprioli mainly plays PLO cash games; this is his fifth EPT and first EPT final table; he finished 16th at EPT London in Season 6 for £19,000.
Single with three children, Guigon is a pharmacist in Dakar and discovered draw poker in the 80s where he was playing big cash games in Dakar. He switched over to Texas Hold'em three years ago and is no stranger to big buy-in events. He says poker is more than a hobby; it’s a real passion especially as he says he is highly competitive. His best performance to date was fourth in a €1,000 WSOP Europe in Cannes last year for €50,000.
Housing contractor Dietrich started playing poker while in his second year at the University of Western Ontario playing home games with friends. A year later, he started playing online. He describes himself as a semi-professional player but his main job is in building. His best live result to date was winning a major online tourney in February 2011 for $135,000. He qualified for the EPT Grand Final via a 25,000 FPP satellite on PokerStars which got him a seat into a 125,000 FPP satellite. He won that – and that got him to Monaco. Dietrich says he prefers play online to live as it's faster and he can play from home. For the last three years, he’s mainly played tournaments. He has known fellow finalist Clayton Mozdzen for years and is pleased he’s also on the final table.
Italian Sergio Castelluccio is a musician and former music teacher. He took up poker four years ago, saying “I’ve always had a passion for games, like chess – also and too many video games!” His best live result was winning PokerStars’ Italian Poker Tour San Remo Main Event in August 2010 for €200,000. He also finished 16th here in Monaco at the EPT Grand Final three years ago for €64,000 – one of his first ever live events. He’s an EPT regular but this is his first EPT final table. On the Italian Poker Tour, he’s made two finals as well as his IPT San Remo victory, plus three further cashes. He plays a lot online but mainly cash games “apart from the Sunday majors when I’m at home”.
Mohsin Charania discovered poker through friends while studying finance at the University of Illinois. Since then he's earned over $3.5 million playing online as "Chicagocards1" and just over $500,000 playing live tournaments.
In 2010, Charania won Event #20 in the PokerStars SCOOP series where he plays as "sms9231". The victory earned him $380,364, the biggest prize of his online career. Charania's first live cash was in 2008, in a $300 tournament at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Since then he's racked up nine WSOP cashes and six WPT scores, including the biggest payday of his career so far which came by way of a sixth-place finish at the 2010 World Poker Finals at Foxwoods Casino, good for $104,741. Charania has one previous EPT cash- a €15,000 46th-place run at EPT Deauville in February. Charania is already guaranteed the biggest result of his live career here in Monaco. Charania has spent the last two months traveling the live tournament circuit with close friend Faraz Jaka, who finished third in the 2012 PCA main event.
Daniel is a professional poker player from Zaragoza who started playing online seven years ago and is now a Supernova Elite on PokerStars. Gomez is known s a high stakes cash game player, playing $5/$10 to $50/$100 limits, as well as the Sunday majors. Gomez is a former chess champion and has a FIDE rating of 2230. His best live poker score to date was finishing fifth at the PokerStars-supported Estrellas Poker Tour event in Malaga last March for €18,020. Other results include 23rd in the PCA $2k NL event for $6,410 in January this year. For the last few months, he’s been living in Bournemouth on the South Coast of England.
Mozdzen is a PokerStars qualifier who won his seat for the EPT Grand Final in a €33 rebuy satellite on PokerStars. He is no stranger to big live events and already has one EPT final table under his belt: EPT Warsaw in Season 6 where he finished sixth for the equivalent of about $80,000 – his biggest live cash to date. He already has nearly $300,000 in live tournament winnings, including €20,000 for 14th at EPT Madrid last month. He has also cashed at EPT San Remo and EPT Tallinn as well as the World Series, NAPT Uncasville and various events in his native Canada. He is a SuperNova on PokerStars with his big online tournament score being tenth out of 2,144 players in a 2009 WCOOP for $75,000. Mozdzen is being supported at the Grand Final by his girlfriend Alexa. The couple have already visited Italy and will head for a romantic break in Paris after the event.
Cailly got her introduction to poker five years ago when her room-mates started playing weekly SNGs in their shared living room. Perhaps indicating a natural-born gambling ability, Lucille quickly found herself booking a last-minute flight to Las Vegas to get over a break-up. Luckily, she didn’t land alone in the poker capital, after meeting French pro Manuel Bevand and a friend at the airport. After this encounter, Cailly dabbled in poker journalism, live-updating EPTs and WPTs while honing her skills online. In 2010, a series of MTT successes persuaded her to jump straight in and become a full time pro. Since then, Cailly mainly plays online, earning the respect of her French peers as a true "grinder" as well as some serious money. Cailly’s best live result was winning a €1k event at the now-defunct Cercle Wagram club in Paris for €26,190. She has also cashed at the Deauville EPTs in 2010 and 2012. A former epistemology student, Lucille lives in La Défense, near Paris.