PokerStars EPT Deauville Main Event Day 5 Recap

A total of 891 players entered the 2011 EPT Deauville Main Event. Last year’s field of 768 had been the event’s biggest turnout by far, but this year’s entries blew the old record out of the water. The increase is likely due to the tournament’s move to a larger and better facility – the Casino Barriere. While the Aussie Millions’ massive buy-in events attracted some of the world’s most recognizable high stakes players, the EPT Deauville stop’s increasing prestige lured pros like Daniel Negreanu and Viktor Blom to Northwestern France instead.

With a €5000 + €300 entry fee, this year’s Main Event was offering a total prize pool of €4,276,800 to be paid out over 128 places. The bubble was reached on Day 4, and at the start of Day 5 today only 24 players were left in the running. Alex Wice came to Day 5 as the chipleader; his stack was nearly twice the size of his closest competitor, Laurent Polito’s. Altogether, Day 4’s top ten players did a reasonably good job of holding their positions.

The crowd at the Aussie Millions has been heavily in favor of their native pros, and it’s been a similar story in Deauville. Fortunately for French poker fans, three of their homegrown pros did manage to eke their way into the final table. Anthony Hnatow started Day 5 with the third largest chip stack but failed to improve his position, falling to the sixth place stack with 100,000 fewer chips going into the final table. Julien Claudepierre made an impressive showing today, as did his fellow Frenchman Lucien Cohen, and they will start the final day with the fourth and fifth stacks, respectively.

Canadian Wice has dropped to the second place position for the final table, and he is the only North American pro left in the running. So who’s the new big stack? In a day full of smart moves (and a little bit of sheer dumb luck), Swedish pro Martin Jacobsen – arguably the most seasoned player left in the competition – managed to scratch his way to the top of the pile; tomorrow he’ll be the man to beat. The player that does ultimately win will take home a sizable €880,000 payout (which translates to $1,202,795). Here are tomorrow’s top contenders by order of stack size:

Martin Jacobson – 7,280,000

Alex Wice – 6,248,000

Kenny Hallaert – 3,599,000

Julien Claudepierre – 3,244,000

Lucien Cohen – 3.085,000

Anthony Hnatow – 1,644,000

Ruslan Prydryk – 1,154,000

Kaspars Renga – 470,000

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