With its absorption into the new “poker festival” structure of tournaments at Pokerstars, this year’s European Poker Tour Prague was the last under that brand, and 29-year-old Dutch pro Jasper Meijer van Putten made the event his own in the Czech capital this week.
He survived a record field of 1,192 entrants in the Euro 5,300 buy-in main event to claim the lion’s share of the Euro 5.78 million prize pool, although his take-home was diluted somewhat by a heads up chop agreement with his last rival, Hungary’s Marton Czuczor.
The final table of the event lasted 7 hours and culminated in Van Putten and Czuczor facing each other in the heads up. Van Putten – a primarily cash game player – had in general dominated the final table action and was playing with skill and confidence.
An earlier chop appeared to have been agreed at the three-handed stage of the game, when survivors Van Putten, Czuczor and US pro David Peters were evenly matched, but Czuczor later backed out of the deal and Peters was subsequently eliminated at third for Euro 397,300.
Van Putten and Czuczor played on, with the Dutch player holding a 3 to 1 lead. A further chop discussion failed to produce agreement, but then the Hungarian managed to even the stacks and a chop negotiation again started, this time ending with an agreement that Van Putten would take Euro 649,300, Czuczor would take home Euro 630,000, and Euro 50,000 would be left on the table for the winner.
Twenty hands later it was all over as the Dutch player gained the advantage and developed it into a convincing win to claim a Euro 699,300 pay-day.
The other final table cashes looked like this:
Sergii Petrushevskii (Russia) Euro 284,550
Marius Gierse (Germany) Euro 203,800
Samantha Cohen (USA) Euro 145,900
David Lopez (Spain) Euro 104,510
Kiryl Radzivonau (Belarus) Euro 74,850