Welcome to the PokerStars Festival Dublin Main Event Day 1A
We'd like to extend a warm welcome to our coverage of the PokerStars Festival Dublin Main Event. Today is the first of three starting flights of the Main Event, which comes with a generous €700,000 guarantee.
This is the first visit to Dublin since February 2016, when Dzmitry Urbanovich continued on his meteoric rise to the top by taking down the EPT 12 Main Event stop held at the Royal Dublin Society for €561,900, but PokerStars has a long and storied history with the Irish capital.
| Season | Date | Field Size | Prize Pool | Winner | Country | Prize Money |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EPT 1 | Oct 2004 | 163 | €244,500 | Ram Vaswani | United Kingdom | €93,000 |
| EPT 2 | Oct 2005 | 248 | €992,000 | Mats Gavatin | Sweden | €317,000 |
| EPT 3 | Oct 2006 | 389 | €1,847,750 | Roland de Wolfe | United Kingdom | €554,300 |
| EPT 4 | Oct-Nov 2007 | 221 | €1,701,700 | Reuben Peters | United States | €532,620 |
| UKIPT 1 | Sept 2010 | 590 | €295,000 | Max Silver | United Kingdom | €72,000 |
| UKIPT 2 | Sept 2011 | 718 | €348,230 | Joeri Zandvliet | Netherlands | €83,500 |
| UKIPT 3 | May 2012 | 597 | €417,900 | Richard Evans | Wales | €75,500 |
| UKIPT 4 | Feb-Mar 2014 | 682 | €463,078 | Kevin Killeen | Ireland | €87,700 |
| UKIPT 5 | Feb 2016 | 1,002 | €971,940 | Vladas Tamasauskas | Lithuania | €176,900 |
| EPT 12 | Feb 2016 | 605 | €3,025,000 | Dzmitry Urbanovich | Poland | €561,900 |
This year's festival is already off to a rip-roaring start with the PokerStars Megastack, a €50,000 guarantee for just a €170 buy-in attracting 465 players, smashing the guarantee by almost €20,000. The organisers will have high hopes then for the rest of the festival as well as the PSF Main Event.
There are a total of three starting flights for the Main Event. Day 1A and 1B start today and tomorrow at 12:00 local time, while the third and final starting flight commences at 21:30 on Friday, September 29th. This flight will be a special turbo flight available for re-entering players only, where the levels are reduced to 20 minutes in length as opposed to 45 minutes in Day 1A and 1B. Levels increase to 60 minutes in length for Day 2 onwards.
Players receive 30,000 in chips for their buy-in and there will be 12 levels of play on Day 1s, with Day 1A and 1B scheduled to finish at around 21:45 each day.
Here is the structure for today:
| Level | Length | Small Blind | Big Blind | Ante |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 45 | 50 | 100 | 0 |
| 2 | 45 | 75 | 150 | 0 |
| 3 | 45 | 100 | 200 | 25 |
| 4 | 45 | 250 | 300 | 50 |
| 5 | 45 | 200 | 400 | 50 |
| 6 | 45 | 250 | 500 | 75 |
| 7 | 45 | 300 | 600 | 100 |
| 8 | 45 | 400 | 800 | 100 |
| 9 | 45 | 500 | 1,000 | 100 |
| 10 | 45 | 600 | 1,200 | 200 |
| 11 | 45 | 800 | 1,600 | 200 |
| 12 | 45 | 1,000 | 2,000 | 300 |
Stay tuned to PokerNews for all the updates throughout the Main Event