Who became the winner of the Main Tournament in Sochi EPT 2019

Uri Gilboa from Israel is now 61 years old. He works as a lawyer and constantly plays poker and bridge. In the final heads-up at the last EPT in Sochi in the Main Event, he played against another native of Israel, Zakhar Babayev, and was able to win, taking with him 27.4 million rubles, which is approximately 422.7 thousand dollars.

Uri has been running his own company Gilboa Law for 30 years, which provides various legal services in the medical field (in particular, situations related to the negligence of doctors). In addition, he is professionally engaged in the production of wines, lectures, writes books and is listed as a judge at various international competitions. All this does not prevent him from playing bridge regularly, and at one time he served as president of the Israel Bridge Association and the Court of Appeal.

He is now the first Israeli as well as a senior EPT member to win the Main Event. Gilboa himself noted that he was especially pleased with the fact that he became the first Israeli champion. However, he noted that among his compatriots there are many other talented players who have received prestigious prizes at the WSOP and other major series. That is why, according to Uri, he is far from the last EPT champion from Israel.

Uri was wearing a T-shirt that says "ROCKY BALBOA" in the tournament, so his friends recommended that he wear it more often as it brings good luck. Because of this, Gilboa wore this jersey all the days of the tournament. Perhaps thanks to this, fortune really smiled at Uri, since he managed to successfully enter the flop and drag coinflips (for example, his confrontation with an ace and a king in his hands against a pair of fives of Yurasov at the beginning of the final). It is worth noting that Uri acted quite tightly, and it really was not difficult to read him, which is why all the players in the final tried to bluff with him without normal equity.

After his victory, Uri immediately asked the question: "Where is Moneymaker?" This is due to the fact that the official representative of PokerStars at the tournament asked him about this shirt. Players who made it to the EPT Sochi final received the following prizes:

For the first place, Uri took $ 392.5 thousand;
His compatriot Zakhar Babaev was able to win 239.1 thousand dollars;
Russian player Maxim Pisarenko received 169.5 thousand dollars;
Another Russian, Ivan Ruban, earned 127.9 thousand dollars at the tournament;
The fifth place was taken by Vyacheslav Mizun with a prize money of 101.3 thousand dollars;
The sixth place is occupied by the Russian Serafim Kovalevsky with a prize of 77 thousand dollars;
Uruguayan Francisco Benitez received 55 thousand dollars;
Dmitry Yurasov was in eighth place and won 37.5 thousand dollars;
Finally, Sergei Petrushevsky took the ninth place with $ 29.7 thousand in prize money.

It is worth noting that payments were made in dollars at the rate of 70 rubles per dollar, so in fact all participants actually received more. The entry fee for the Main Event was $ 2740, and the rake here was 17.5 thousand rubles. The guaranteed prize pool of the tournament was 150 million rubles, and it included 758 players (among them there are 563 unique users and 195 repeated entries). And yet the guarantee was not broken and the overlay was just over 132,119,400 rubles.

Possibly, PokerStars this time simply could not hold a sufficient number of satellites through which you can go further with the won ticket to the Main Tournament. At the end of each week, the Stars tried to attract additional audiences by cutting their satellite entrance fees to just $ 215. Still, most of the winners made it to the tournament with a direct buy-in.

And yet, the overlay is a minor drawback against the background of the high level of organization of the event, since here the Stars tried to improve security during the tournaments, and also made a fairly quick registration and covered their events in every possible way. The food was inexpensive and the coffee and drinks were free.