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Home / Uncategorized / EPT10 Grand Final: George Danzer breaks his duck. Who knew?

Everyone seems to want to give George Danzer the rub-down.

“Come on, you’ve done this before,” the photographer Jules Pochy said to Danzer a moment ago, handing him a silver, spade-shaped trophy in preparation for a winner’s photo.

Danzer was playing Day 2 of the Main Event, but last night took down the €1,000+€1,000+€100 Turbo Bounty tournament at the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo®Casino EPT Grand Final and had been beckoned to a makeshift photographer’s set for the victory photo during a pause in Main Event play.

“Actually I haven’t,” Danzer said, apologising for having deposited a big thumb-print on the front of the trophy, a rookie’s error if ever there was one.
“Really?” Pochy said.
“Yeah, I’ve never won a live tournament before,” Danzer said.

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George Danzer: Champion at last

Pochy was not the first person to struggle to contain incredulity. We had a similar moment of doubt in the press room this morning, when we learned of Danzer’s success last night.

But it’s true. If you look at the Team PokerStars Pro’s tournament results page, it shows live tournament winnings of more than $1.1m and 13 final table appearances. But until last night, no victories. What on earth has he been doing at all these final tables?

“Was it that many? Wow,” Danzer said, evidently as shocked as all of us that he’d been so close so many times. “Actually I’m pretty positive when I go into the final tables. Most of them, not all of them, but most of them, I thought I was going to win, especially the deuce to seven ones, when I really thought I had everything under control. Even if my stack wasn’t so big, I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m going to make this because I know how to play this game.'”

Or perhaps not, as the case always seemed to be.

The difference last night, Danzer said, was that he was at a final table containing seven other players who “really didn’t care”.

“It was a bounty tournament and it was seven Russian speaking players at the final table,” Danzer said. “One guy had 18 bounties before we started the final table, I think. So you know how the play is going to work, they didn’t even look at the ICM. I just played standard and the odds of me winning this tournament were much much higher because people just wanted to have bounties and didn’t want to win the tournament. That made it easier. The dynamic with the bounties made a huge difference.”

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George Danzer in Main Event action

Danzer picked up eight bounties of his own, and said the breakthrough may have come at a good time. At the end of this week, he will return home a prepare for SCOOP, intending to play all buy-ins in all of the 44 tournaments. (It should be noted, Danzer has won plenty of online tourneys.) After that he has only five days off before heading to Las Vegas and the World Series of Poker where he’s planning a “big grind this year”.

“I’ll play all the $10,000 mixed game tournaments and the $50K 8-game tournament,” Danzer said, admiring his trophy. “Maybe this has broke the bad run on final tables. I can go for the big ones.”

EPT10 Grand Final, event #24
Date: April 27. 2014
Buy-in: €2,100
Game: NLHE Turbo Bounty €1,000 + €1,000
Players: 145
Prize pool: €136,300

1. George Danzer, Germany, Team PokerStars Pro, €32,300
2. Ilkin Amirov, Azerbaijan, €22,300
3. Dmitry Ponomarev, Russia, €14,700
4. Igor Suchkov, Russia, €12,150
5. Murad Akhundov, Azerbaijan, €9,750
6. Andrejs Perederejevs, Latvia, €7,650
7. David Zeynalyan, Russia, €5,700
8. Alexander Shelukhin, Russia, €4,250
9. Robert Soogea, Netherlands, €3,250
10. Joseph El Khoury, Lebanon, €2,750
11. Nicolas Chouity, Lebanon, €2,750
12. Tariel Robanishvili, Russia, €2,500
13. Sylvain Mazza, France, €2,500
14. Aleksandr Tulaev, Russia, €2,250
15. David Amiryan, Russia, €2,250
16. Jean Mikhael, Lebanon, €2,000
17. Ricardo Fasanaro, Brazil, €2,000
18. Alex Bilokur, Russia, €1,750
19. Paul Newey, United Kingdom, €1,750
20. Jonathan Duhamel, Canada, Team PokerStars Pro, €1,750

All the hand-by-hand action, including chip counts, will be in the panel at the top of the Main Event page. We will have feature pieces below that. There’s also feature table action on EPTLive.

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