
Miami John Cernuto, one of the high-profile Americans who made it over to Vienna for the ParadisePoker World Heads Up Poker Championship, is now one of the UK’s most recognisable poker faces.
He won the no-limit hold’em match play event at the Concord Card Casino in the Austrian capital and as the quarter-final stages onwards were televised Miami John featured in all three shows which were broadcast on Sky Sports.
Not only that the shows were shown three times each night. Because the event was heads up so the camera has only two players to focus on Miami must have been on screen for about four hours.
ParadisePoker in conjunction with Betfair sponsored the heads-up championship for the first time, adding EURO 25,000 to the prize pool and underwriting the costs of the TV productions. For the record Miami John beat English player Anthony Chapman in the final winning EURO 60,000. Anthony who won his seat in a ParadisePoker online satellite picked up EURO 25,000.
Next year the event moves venues to the Gran Casino, Barcelona – the Spanish city which hosted the 1968 Olympics.
Another major poker happening to be televised was the Grand Prix de Paris staged at the Aviation Club de France on the French capital’s Champs Elysees.
This EURO 10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em event generated a pool of over $1 million so it was not surprising that many of the top American players forgot their fear of flying and jetted over.
Another factor which boosted the field to 96 players was the fact that it was the first leg of the World Poker Tour’s second “season”.
Such serial tournament winners as Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Scotty Nguyen, Men the Master and Eric Seidel joined the line-up.
But when it got to the bit where the big money gets shared out it was the French home team which was on top. First place went to youthful David Benyamine who picked up Euro 370,000 plus with his countryman Jan Boubli in second spot and runner-up winnings of over Euro 170,000.
How did they do it?
All will be revealed when the final table is shown as part of the WPT poker series on the Travel Channel in the USA later this year.
Because the Grosvenor Victoria Casino in London is just a Eurostar train ride away under the English Channel it was assumed that many of the Americans would take the opportunity to go and relieve some of the Brits of their English pounds.
And there was a major no-limit hold’em tournament there running under the title of the European Championship. Now betting on poke risk becoming pretty popular on this side of the pond and as the sponsor of the Vic event was a betting firm called BlueSquare, they put up the odds.
Trouble for them was that they had little idea who these Americans were and when they opened their book had Phil Ivey priced at 100 to 1.
The price lasted about two minutes as the smart money moved in and by the time the dust had settled Phil was 33 to 1 favourite.
Can’t tell you how the Phil backers got on or the result as deadline time beckons and the tournament doesn’t even take place for another five days.