The Grand Prix de Paris lost some of its glamour when the World Poker Tour was forced to pull out of this year’s event due to pressure from the French gaming authorities, but it hasn’t stopped the Aviation Club from playing host to yet another absorbing big buy-in poker tournament.
Only a little over 160 players paid up the €10,000 buy-in to compete in this year’s main-event, meaning a top prize of just €422,560, significantly less than last year’s €712,500 first prize. Still, it is not a figure to be sniffed at, and a number of top pros clearly saw this as a great opportunity to get their hands on a six-figure pay day.
The most determined man in the Aviation Club seemed to be Ram Vaswani. “The Crazy Horse” started like a firework, gaining the chip lead by the close of play on Day One and keeping it until the penultimate day.
Despite conceding the chiplead yesterday Ram is still in the thick of it, and will start the final table in third position. Just ahead of Ram is Jeffrey Lisandro, the Australian poker pro whose battle with Prahlad Freidman (Spirit Rock) in the WSOP main-event last year featured heavily in ESPN’s coverage of the tournament. Lisandro has played an interesting strategy in Paris, with much more limping and check calling than you would expect in a big buy-in tournament, but the ploy has clearly worked given his starting position on today’s final table.
But the man they will all be chasing is Will Ma, who heads into the final table with 610,000 chips, helped by a run of good hands yesterday which included a flopped set of aces and flopped trip jacks.
The chip counts for the final table are as follows:
Will Ma – 610,000
Jeffrey Lisandro – 490,000
Ram Vaswani – 413,000
David Redlin – 370,000
Runar Runarsson – 309,000
Tor Gammelgard – 255,000
Paul Gourlay – 122,000
Yuri Kerzhapkin – 111,000
Jeff Wallace – 103,000