European Poker Tour Grand Final in Monte Carlo

The European Poker Tour rolls back into beautiful Monte Carlo on the Cote d'Azure for the 2008 EPT Grand Final on Saturday.

Some of the most well-known poker pros will be on hand to battle for what has become one of the biggest prizepools in the poker world.

This €10,000 ($15,700) buy-in tour championship event drew 706 players last year and is expected to exceed that number this year.

The total amount generated was a staggering €6,636,400 ($10.5 million) awarding €1,825,010 ($2.4 million) to the champion, pink-haired American poker pro Gavin Griffin, who also went on to become the only poker player to win the coveted triple-crown of poker with a WSOP bracelet, a WPT title and an EPT victory.

Cashing in last year's event were poker pros Andy Black, Ram Vaswani, Carlos Mortensen, Phillip Hilm, Team Bodog's Josh Arieh, Chad Brown, Thomas Wahlroos, Team Bodog WSOP Europe qualifier Atanas Gueorguiev, Thomas Bihl and Jonathan "FieryJustice" Little.

They were joined by a whole host of other recognizable faces and names too numerous to mention right here, especially on a Friday afternoon.

For this year's event, Team Bodog will once again be represented by WSOP bracelet winners Arieh and David Williams.

Arieh is coming off a preliminary event win at the 2008 Wynn Classic and a second-place finish at the WSOP Circuit event in New Orleans.

Williams final tabled a $5,000 buy-in preliminary at the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic in Las Vegas and just won the latest week of the NBC television show Poker After Dark.

According to EPT.com, there are already 320 online qualifiers registered for the event, which is almost half of last year's field already.

So, expectations are high, which is as it should be for one of poker's premier events. Stay tuned for wrap-ups of the action in Monte Carlo.

News Added: 12 April, 2008

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