Belgian Kitai Wins Germany’s Largest Poker Tournament

It was the third time the European Poker Tour visited Germany’s capital and 745 players from around the world took a shot at the €5000 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em Main Event.

Two years after the infamous raid by armed attackers that made worldwide headlines, the tournament returned to the Grand Ballroom of the Hyatt Hotel on Potsdamer Platz for this year’s event.

With drastically heightened security measures in place this time, among them a metal detector at the entrance, the organizers saw no reason to go back to the Spielbank Berlin where the event had been moved last year.

With two starting days due to the large field of players, it took almost a week to determine a winner. Originally €825.000 was set as the first-place prize but when Kitai and Chen made it to heads-up play they agreed upon a deal.

Players do this quite often as with two people left they know it’s usually the luckier player who wins, not necessarily the better one. So they split up the prize money for the top two spots and left €80.000 extra to play for.

In the end, Kitai did turn out to be the luckier one, avoiding several bust-outs with worse hands than his opponent.

With three German players at the final table – Bahadir Kilickeser, André Morath und Mario Puccini – the locals had high hopes and were looking forward to seeing the first German winner since Sandra Naujoks won the German EPT in Dortmund three years ago.

Their dreams were not to be fulfilled, though, as Kilickeser, Puccini and Morath busted in fifth, fourth and third place, respectively.

The next and last stop of this season of the European Poker Tour is right around the corner.

The Grand Final began this week in Monte Carlo, Monaco, and the main event winner will surely be looking at a payout of over 1 million euro.