WPT Marrakech: High Roller Event Day 1

Nazgul and Trader of Team PokerStrategy.com both entered in the High Roller event in Marrakech. They were joined a legion of French players and four other PokerStrategists.

Team PokerStrategy.com players Trader and Nazgul entered the High Roller competition in Marrakech. Each had to pay €9,000 in order to participate. Other PokerStrategists that could cough up the money were psychobenny, fabstinho and ace0ntheriver.

The five of them actually made more than 10% of the entire field, as only 45 players entered the competition in total. The total prize pool is €405,000 of which roughly €150,000 will be awarded to first place.

At this moment 35 players remain and the average stack is 39,000 with blinds starting at 150/300 and 25 ante. You can follow the action again at 17:00 CET in the forum.

Go to WPT Marrakech Live Ticker

Trader French-fried

The Tournament in Marrakech is mainly played by French players which qualified online. Trader could consider himself lucky with the table he had. His opponents were undertaking special strategies such as opening 9 big blinds under the gun. 

Unfortunately Trader got his wings clipped by one of these special strategies and plunged from 30,000 chips all the way down to 3,500.

With the blinds only being 75/150 Trader still had a fighting chance. He doubled and doubled again, getting calls with on a board from for twenty big blinds.

When he was back to around 16,000 he ran with the nuts into the bigger nuts, pocket kings against pocket aces.
Trader dropped out of the € 150,000 race in 38th place.

Nazgul Climbs Above Average

Nazgul was a bit quiet at the start of the day. Probably his French skills weren't good enough to feel comfortable. As he got a feel for his table, his mouth relaxed a little and words came out.

Between all the yapping, Nazgul actually lost a portion of his stack by folding pocket queens, after raising, being re-raised and another re-raise behind him.

No serious damage done and Nazgul slowly picked up chips here and there. At one point he was stressing about getting a monster, because his opponents are calling everything anyway!

That's actually almost exactly what he did himself in the last hand. Right before the paper chip bags were dropped on the table by the casino personnel, Barney Boatman decided to give Nazgul a try.

The following hand put Nazgul on a solid 42,000 for Day 2:

Other PokerStrategists

A horrible start for fabstinho who was already down to 5,000 before the first two hours were up. He flopped a set of eights against a set of kings in the third hand and managed to not go broke with it.

After that he lost a big pot with pocket queens against pocket kings in a late position heads up. He was then crippled so much he shipped it in with ace-ten against a loose opener and got called by the preflop nuts, aces.

psychobenny was doing a lot better. In fact he was the only PokerStrategists who managed to accumulate chips after the first two hours of play. All this didn't help as he busted right before the day ended by getting a flush over flush against him.

ace0ntheriver managed to hop back on average in the very last hand. With only 45 seconds on the clock till the end of the day, ace0ntheriver was actually moved to a new table. A unorthodox, yet not unfortunate situation for him. He managed to 4 bet it all in with pocket aces and get called by ace queen. He ended the day with 31,000 - a dashing thousand more than he started with.