The Grand Prix de Paris has lost some of its glamour this year after the World Poker Tour was forced to pull out after pressure from the French authorities, but that hasn’t stopped the Aviation Club from hosting yet another intriguing big buy-in poker tournament.
Only around 160 players paid up the €10,000 buy-in to compete in this years event, meaning a top prize of just €422,560, significantly less than last years top prize of €712,500. Still, it is not to be sniffed at, a number of top pro’s clearly saw this year’s smaller Grand Prix as a great opportunity to make the final table.
The most driven man in the Aviation Club seemed to be Ram Vaswani. “The Crazy Horse” was out of the blocks like a 100 metre sprinter and took the chip lead by the end of Day One, and kept it until the penultimate day.
Despite conceding the chiplead 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 pro whose battle with Prahlad Freidman in the WSOP main-event last year featured heavily in ESPN’s coverage of the tournament. Lisandro has played a bizarre game in Paris, with much more limping and check calling than you would expect in a big buy-in tournament, but the strategy has clearly worked given his starting position on today’s final table.
But the man they all need to catch is Will Ma, who heads 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