It's on!
The first 888live event of 2016 has officially started.
After a glorious morning spent skiing, snowboarding, and playing poker on the snow at the Ski Resort Innsbruck Igls, the players have started to arrive at the Casino Innsbruck, where Tatjana Pasalic just welcomed the first 'shuffle up and deal' of the 2016 888live Austria Main Event.
The two-day $400 Main Event will see the players compete for a guaranteed prize pool of $50,000 and for a title that is now in the hands of Germany's Thorsten Facius, the one who emerged victorious and almost $15,000 richer one year ago after an heads-up duel played with Bosnia and Herzegovina's Andelo Bozic.
While 888poker pros Dominik Nitsche and Sofia Lovgren are surely the two biggest names in the field, the Main Event welcomes also sixty players who were crafty enough to secure a $1,700 package through the online satellites run by the poker room.
Amongst those, we found Domink Hine, a 54 year old online qualifier from London who joins the event in Austria after having been part of the 888live local tournament held in Luton, U.K., back in 2015. "I have to admit it, I got really lucky as I gained my entrance through a freeroll and won one of the ten tickets which were up for grabs," Hine explained.
"What have I been doing in my life? I used to be a JCB operator and then a van driver for many years but now I just play poker. I started with play money on Facebook and then, after having collected over two hundred million chips, I opened my first real money account on 888poker, thanks to a really good promotion. Lady Luck has not been on my side for the last two weeks but I hope she smiles at me this weekend!"
Spotted in the tournament room also the reigning champion Thorsten Facius. "I just couldn't miss it after last year's experience," Facius explaines. "This is my fifth time with 888live events: besides Seefeld I have played two times in Prague and one time in Morocco. I recently switched to Omaha after having been playing Hold'em for years. I financed my studies with poker but it's not my main job as I'm a specialist in accident reconstruction."
Making a back-to-back win is really hard, but Thorsten wants to give it a try: "I really hope to make it again this time, even though I'm aware that in a single shot it's mainly a matter of luck."
All the images on this live blog are courtesy of Fabian Grubler - Fabfotos