World Series Starts With a Bang, and Euro Players Are a Big Part of It PDF Print E-mail
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From the Editor - July 2009
The World Series is off to a flying start, with records being set right and left, and European players are a big reason for them.

The first big event, the 40th Anniversary $40,000 No-Limit Hold’em Special, set a record for largest prize pool for a non-Main Event. The 201 entries generated a massive pool of  $7,718,400, and it was won by a Russian, Vitaly Lunkin. Which brings forth the question: What’s up with the Russians lately? Are they the new Scandinavians? Anyway, Vitaly will be bringing back a cool $1,891,012 across the pond to add to his take from the first PokerStars Russian Tour event in Moscow, which he won a month before his bracelet triumph. Apparently, like horses and dogs, there is something to poker players being “in form,” or at least running well.

Lunkin had gone into the heads-up with a 2-1 chip deficit in the most stacked event in WSOP history. The final table included the likes of Greg Raymer, Ted Forrest and Justin Bonomo, but with careful play Lunkin navigated his way through all obstacles. Except for Alexander Veldhuis of the Netherlands (eighth), he was the only non-American at the final table.

Event 3, the first Omaha event, set a record for largest live Omaha ($1,500 Omaha/8 in this case) field ever. The 918 hopefuls bested last year’s record of 833, a 9 percent increase thanks to Europeans diving into the event in big numbers. Amazingly, it was won by the same player who won it last year, Vietnamese/Vegas pro Thang Luu, who led wire to wire. He has finished second-first-first in this event in the past three years. It was an accomplishment so merit-worthy that even the jaded cash-game players in the Amazon Room stopped their games to give him a round of applause. They should also applaud the fact that despite “the economy,” this event’s field has increased by 33 percent in just two years.

In the first open no-limit hold’em event, 6,000 players rushed the ticket window for a seat in the $1,000 buy-in Stimulus Special, creating a prize pool of more than $5 million. If there wasn’t a 6,000-player cap in Event 4, they’d probably still be selling entries. It was the largest non-Main Event field in WSOP history, blowing away the then-record 3,929 entrants who participated in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em tournament at last year’s Series.

So the first three open events set records. It’s going to be quite a summer.
 

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