The Cold War was replaced by hot action in a Vienna casino this week. With five players each from Eastern and Western Europe, both cultural pride and a Euro 100 000 prizepool were at stake at Party Poker’s East vs West Cup final table poker confrontation.
Half the prizepool was earmarked to pay the top winners, with the remaining Euro 50 000 going to the winning team and divvied up among its players, all of whom had qualified in online poker satellites. To reach the final table, two 50 man teams, all qualified online, had earlier battled it out, deciding who would be among the five players from each side to sit down at the final table.
Biggest winner of the day was the thirty one year old Danish butcher Thomas Jensen, who finished as the top player in a tense heads up with his team captain from the UK, David “Devilfish” Ulliott and took home the first prize of Euro 12 500 and his share of the winning West team’s Euro 50 000.
On the geographic divide it was the West that was best despite an early dominance by the Eastern players, who eliminated three Western players in quick succession to give their team a 5 to 2 player advantage on the 10 man table. However, it was not enough to stop Ulliott and Jensen, who ended up the two survivors when third placed TonyG went to the rail as the last remaining Eastern player after a clash with Jensen, who was playing in his first major tournament.
“I’m not really a big time player,” Jensen said. “Everything seemed to go right for me on the day but I felt a lot more pressure when I hit the televised table and the captains were on there with me. There was so much talking and I had to concentrate even harder.”