2013 PokerStars.com EPT Prague

On Saturday, Season 10 European Poker Tour Prague Main Event continued with Day 2 action from the Hilton in the Czech Republic’s largest city. Nine late entries combined with the 389 players from Day 1a and 609 from Day 1b brought the total field to 1,007 players — a 17% increase from Season 9’s 864 players — which created a prize pool of €4,883.950 that will be paid to the top 151 finishers.

Day 2 began with 549 players returning to action, but after six 75-minute levels of play just 189 remained. The man best positioned to capture the €889,000 first-place prize is Walid Bou Habib, who finished as the Day 2 chip leader with 509,000. You may recall Habib, who hails from Lebanon, was runner-up in the EPT9 Deauville, which you can read about by clicking here.

Action resumed in Level 9 (400/800/100) and straight out of the gate players began to fall including Somar Al-Darwich, Toby Lewis, Micah Raskin, Oleksii Kovalchuk, and defending champ Ramzi Jelassi.

Jelassi actually fell in Level 10 (500/1,000/100) when Elfad Mammadov opened for 1,800 and was raised by the active Nikov Dobromir Georgiev to 5,200. Jelassi, who had folded to a river bet a few hands before to leave him with a stack of 14,100, then moved all in from the small blind. Mammadov tank-folded and then Georgiev made the call.

Georgiev:
Jelassi:

The flop was dealt and it appeared Jelassi was going to win the race, but the turn gave Georgiev back the lead. The river missed Jelassi’s straight draw, and that meant there would be no repeat victory for the Swedish pro.

Before long Jelassi had company on the rail in the form of Bryn Kenney, Caicai Huang, Sergio Aido, Gaelle Baumann, Luca Pagano, Daniel Negreanu, and Martin Finger, who was the last former EPT champ standing.

There’s no doubt some big names fell on Day 2, but plenty of them made it through the night including Jonathan Little (471,100), Sebastian Saffari (428,000), Amir Lehavot (427,500), Kevin Iacofano (380,000), Ana Marquez (319,400), Max Silver (259,000), Ludovic Lacay (242,800), Ari Engel (240,300), and Darren Elias (224,100).

Day 3 will kick off at Noon local time on Sunday, and the money bubble ought to burst early on. Of course the PokerNews Live Reporting Team will be on hand to bring you all the latest and greatest from the largest EPT Prague in history!.

While you wait, check out this EPT10 Prague Hand Analysis with Jonathan Little:

The tournament staff has just announced that the remaining players will play four more hands before calling it a night. They will then return tomorrow at Noon local time to play five 90-minute levels, during which time the money will be reached.

We're headed down to the tournament floor to capture any last-minute action and compile a list of notable chips counts. Please stay tuned for those as well as a full recap of the Day 2 action.

A couple of last level exits to tell you about now...

First David Peters got his last 65,000 in with against Nikita Nikolaev who had the fact that Nikolaev had his suits covered would turn out to be significant as the board came jack high with four clubs and Nikolaev made the nuts to send Peters to the rail.

An Andrew Hulme has also busted, he told me: "An active player ( Jesper Winzerling) made it 4,800 from early position, I three-bet from the small blind to 11,200 from a stack of 52,500 with and he called. The flop was to give me a straight and I made a mistake, I had a mental block or something and only bet 5,000, he called. The turn was a queen, I bet 8,600 with 30,000 back to give him room to shove, which he did with [K][10] and the river was a jack to give him a better straight. I thought I'd got pretty lucky for a bit, but I didn't," he deadpanned.

The last half hour has been very cagey. With only 15 minutes left on the clock now the players can see the end of day finishing line. We saw a few players lay down hands like and if it meant jeopardizing their tournament life and failing to make it through to Day 3. For some players surely equity calculations go out the window when it comes to the bragging rights of having made it through two days of such a prestigious tournament as the Prague EPT.

Dmitri Holdeew just got his chips in preflop versus Filippo Lazzaretto. Holdeew had his 76,500 at risk with while Lazzaretto had him covered with . You could've guessed it reading the title of this little post, but up until the river everything was going smooth for the Italian: . The spoiled the Italian party though and you could even hear some Italian words of despair.

Whilst last year's winner, Ramzi Jelassi and third place finisher David Boyaciyan may have been eliminated on Day 2 the meat in that sandwich - runner-up Sotirios Koutoupas - is still going strong. As we head into the last 30 minutes of the day he's got 162,000 and is sat at the same table as Amir Lehavot.

David Boyaciyan, who was recently eliminated, has reached the previous two EPT Prague final tables and last year was part of a three-way deal full of drama, passion and no shortage of animosity. The PokerStars Blog talks to Boyaciyan about that day.