The Top Ranking All-Time EPT Earners

As EPT Season 10 is drawing towards its end, with the much awaited Super High Roller event about to start and the #EPTGrandFinal kicking off this weekend, RankingHero takes a look at the top five EPT earners in the history of the tour (since 2004):

The EPT earnings ranking for the last 6 months:

Season 9 totalled 6,584 players who competed for a prize pool of €37,396,591. The Grand Final in May 2013 was won by @Steve O'Dwyer  who earned $1,589,003 with his first place. We'll have to wait until the weekend to see if the number of registrations will exceed last year's 513. The other great poker event - the Super High Roller (April 24-26) - is about to begin and RankingHero will keep you posted, of course!

Meanwhile, we'll be enjoying the view virtually as players keep sending fantastic photos from Monaco :)

Photo: Earth Pics

Mike McDonald Selling ETP Monte Carlo Action

Next time you see the photo of a happy poker winner with a pile of money, don't assume he or she will be buying a brand new yellow Lamborghini the next day (though this is exactly what @Mike McDonald did some years ago :) The bulk of the winner's earnings may actually go to his/her stakers.

Even though he is one of the top live winners in the world of poker, with earnings amounting to $10,079,058, Mike has been selling action in the 2+2 marketplace for the Monte Carlo 100,000k buy-in Super High Roller:

Hey, I'm selling off pieces for the MC super high roller. I'm going to lock in the exchange rate at 1.38130 and sell 1% for $1500 (1.086 MU).

Poker has been going great lately- I've final tabled my last 6 super high rollers, 2nd in PCA and in the last month recorded my biggest score on Stars for winning the Sunday 109r, and my biggest score on FTP for chopping the FTOPS ME.

I read there should be a plane full of Macau VIPs in this tournament as well as all the regular faces.

I'm looking to sell off pieces in 2% chunks or larger and for the time being am just selling for 1 bullet.

In 2008, barely 18 years old, he became the youngest person ever to win an EPT title - the German Open in Dortmund, which brought him $1,374,064. Now Mike McDonald jokingly tweeted he wants to go down in history as the first man to win a second EPT title (repeating the sensational feat accomplished by @Victoria Coren Mitchell at #EPTSanremo a few days ago).

The Super High Roller will run through April 24-26 and the 99th EPT Main Event - the Monte Carlo #EPTGrandFinal Season 10 - starts on Saturday, April 26th. Mike will be a key player in both and we wish him luck :)

Read on:

Mike Timex McDonald

Staking - Key Financial Tool of the Poker Economy

http://www.rankinghero.com/en/festivals/7909/2014-pokerstars-ept---monte-carlo.html

WPT World Championship

The pros who are not already in Monaco or on their way to the #EPTGrandFinal can only be in one other place: across the Atlantic, at the Borgata. The $15,400 buy-in WPT World Championship is drawing a star-studded field of players and Day 1B is just beginning as we write.

Some of the champs who busted yesterday were @Chris Moorman @Ryan Riess and @Eugene Katchalov . Eliminated players may re-enter today and Riess and Katchalov are among the ones firing their second bullets.

Players to watch out for among the 62 (out of 105) Day 1A survivors include @Marvin Rettenmaier @Shannon Shorr @Phil Hellmuth  and @Scott Seiver.  

The Day1A chip leader is @Paul Volpe whose live tournament earnings since 2008 amount to $2,446,632. Volpe had an amazing 2013 with 21 ITM at major tournaments (out of total 46 ITM finishes). He earned his biggest cash to date when he finished runner-up in the WPT LAPC Main Event for $651,170 and immediately followed up with a third place and $435,610 at the 2013 WPT Shooting Star.

Check out Paul Volpe's performance and earnings on his profile page:

http://www.rankinghero.com/en/players/21798/paul-volpe/stats.html

The Women Who Have Made EPT History

Since 2004, when the European Poker Tour was founded, only three women have made their way into EPT history as Main Event winners and one of the three actually made EPT history by becoming the first woman champion and the first player - man or woman - with a second title. They are @Victoria Coren Mitchell @Sandra Naujoks and @Liv Boeree :

2006 EPT3 London 

Victoria Coren became the first woman to win an EPT Main Event for $942,892!

2009 EPT5 Dortmund

Germany's Sandra Naujoks topped a field of 667 at the EPT Dortmund and became the second-ever female champion on the European Poker Tour earning $1,196,668.

2010 EPT6 Sanremo

The very next year it was Liv Boeree's turn to make women proud and inspire them with her $1,675,713 prize.

2014 EPT10 Sanremo

Four seasons later, #EPTSanremo  proved lucky for women again as Vicky Coren did it a sensational second time. The feat is unprecedented for all 98 EPT Main Events since 2004 - Coren Mitchell is the first two-time EPT champion in history! She earned the second biggest cash in her career - $645,219.

More on RankingHero:

The Cover Girls of Poker - Liv Boeree

Victoria Coren in the Run for a Second EPT Title at Sanremo

#womenINpoker 

Victoria Coren in the Run for a Second EPT Title at Sanremo

She is classy, witty, smart, and we love her - @Victoria Coren  was the first woman to win a  @European Poker Tour event in Season 3, 2006 and as we write, she is one of only three players left at #EPTSanremo with a chance for a second EPT title, along with @Dimitar Danchev and @Michael Tureniec .

Victoria has said that she regularly stays up until 6 am, "..smoking and drinking and gambling. But I like cooking and gardening too, which makes me sound like a very strange mix of an old lady and teenage boy." You can enjoy her keen sense of humor in her weekly columns for The Observer and The Guardian newspapers. 

Her poker memoir For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker was published in September 2009 and is still selling well, and her other book, Once More, with Feeling, tells the story of "the year that Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton spent trying to make the greatest erotic movie of all time".

Victoria at Sanremo today as she tweets the photo below where she is enjoying a massage by EPTLive commentator @Joe Stapleton:

Victoria's last cash was from a 20th place in a high roller event at 2013 EPT London and she has made the bubble at Sanremo so is adding another ITM to her earnings. GL!

Weekly RankingHero Highlights

Those who cannot play poker on Everest.fr have been watching with envy as the fantastic contest #vegashero took off this week on RankingHero with the first mission. Entrants are asked to put together the perfect Vegas experience package from a list of options (from burgers and limos to hot-air balloon rides or a night at the Rhino strip club). Take a look and get ideas and inspiration in the hope that RankingHero will soon offer an equally fun promotion for which we will all be eligible :)

http://www.rankinghero.com/fr/pros/45/vegashero/activity/736409.html#activity

We have been following the #EPTSanremo and you will be happy to see the newly added hashtag to the festival results page - now you will be able to check the latest winners and EPT Sanremo posts and comments  in a single stop :)

Don't forget our great tools that allow you to compare player stats and to get data about earnings in a specific circuit only:

Bulgarians have been performing great ever since Eureka Poker Tour and #EPTVienna - as many as 4 made it to Day 3 at #EPTSanremo , including the #PCA2013 champion @Dimitar Danchev 

Our birthday boys this week - Sorel Mizzi and Jason Somerville! 

Featured poker ambassadors - Xuan Liu and Sofia Lovgren have signed with 888poker; Vanessa Selbst met Rafael Nadal in a charity heads-up match.

Other stories you may have missed - the Phil Ivey lawsuits and cheating accusations from two casinos.

Warm welcome to @Gaetan Balleur @Stephane Allard @Alain Le Pen @Danny Covyn @Mustapha Cheikh @Vincent Hinterlang  @Gwendoline Janot and @Claudine Couppe to mention only some of our latest members.

Special thanks to @Gillian Epp for sharing her interview with Colin Burton and to @Christophe Ducos for the gif-illustrated hand history :)

Keep posting, liking and sharing and bringing the RankingHero community to life! Like us and help us grow on Facebook, as well :)

Yours truly,

@Annie RKH 

PS

Important addition to this week's update: @Olivier Demabre has been driving us crazy with his #2048game scores and I hope someone will soon challenge his unofficial title as RankingHero 2048 Champion :)

Sorel Mizzi Makes it to Day 2 at EPT San Remo on His Birthday

He has been around longer than most - @Sorel Mizzi 's earliest recorded live win on RankingHero dates back to 2006 and he has since amassed the impressive $9,362,290 from live tournaments! His latest - and incidentally, his biggest - cash was in February 2014 when he finished runner-up in the Aussie Millions Main Event for $895,341.

The Canadian pro was born in Toronto on this day of April 16th in 1986. Right now he is playing #EPTSanremo and was one of the 316 players who survived into Day 2 which happily coincides with his birthday.

Here is Sorel enjoying a massage at EPT Sanremo and he will be playing on the featured table after the first break for the day so you can watch him live on http://www.europeanpokertour.com/tv/

HB, GL and celebrate with moderation tonight! :)

Happy Birthday Jason Somerville!

HB and congratulations to @Jason Somerville on cohosting the PokerNews podcast during the 2014 WSOP! 

27 years young and getting younger every day :)

PokerNews have just announced that Jason will cohost their live program during the #2014WSOP  three times a week. It's difficult to imagine a better choice in view of Jason's great performance at WSOP - the 2011 bracelet winner has made 4 WSOP final tables and more than $2 million of his live career winnings of $2,527,227 are from WSOP tournaments.

Furthermore, the Ultimate Poker ambassador has long been entertaining fans with his livestreams and video blogs which are a great and fun source of strategic and tactical poker knowledge so the coverage is bound to be insightful and amusing.

Xuan Liu - the First Woman to Make a PCA Final Table - Signs with 888poker

@Xuan Liu  (she pronounces her name 'shu-on') is a Chinese-born Canadian poker player who made poker history in 2012 as the first woman to make the final table at one of the most prestigious and toughest EPT stops - Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure. Her family immigrated to Toronto, Canada when she was five and had already learned to play all sorts of games of skill and chance. Poker was not among them though and Xuan developed a taste for it as a student at Waterloo University (social development studies and political science) when she realized her studies were not likely to give her the kind of fulfillment and lifestyle she admired and wanted for herself. 

"I was uninterested in the traditional pathway to adulthood for many reasons. I wanted to pursue adventures and environments that would nurture self-discovery, not frivolous diplomas that no longer guaranteed interesting work placements in a rapidly changing economy. My priorities shifted and focused on how I can sustain a lifestyle of freedom and inspiration rather than submissing to the standard pathway to subjective success."

"I improved rapidly after diving myself into whatever poker literature I could get my hands on, and realized there was a plethora of opportunities to make money not just while playing but also in poker as a business." In fact, Xuan's first 'business venture' was a $1/2 home game she hosted (and raked) on campus. 

"In 2010 I was doing well playing small stakes online and incorporated a trip to Macau while visiting family in China. I final tabled two tournaments on my 4-day trip and was given the blessing to focus on poker by my parents. The clincher? If I didn’t achieve an outstanding break-through result in one year I must give up my Bohemian lifestyle and pursue more traditional career paths.

In late 2010 I took my first trip to Europe, chopped an Italian Poker Tour side event, and had two more half a million dollar tournament cashes within months of each other at European Poker Tour San Remo Season 7 and PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Season 8. My family has just about accepted me as a poker player."

Well, Xuan has certainly earned the right to stick with her 'Bohemian lifestyle' and the poker world has gained a bright young talent thanks to this deal with her family, as evidenced by the breakdown below of her $1,391,872 in live tournament earnings since 2007 :)

"All this publicity is nice, but it’s also making me anxious to win something soon. Yes, my lifetime ROI is still pretty sweet and the actual main focus when doing these interviews for me is to draw awareness to the game, but I’d rather take a confidence boost in the form of a final table any day."

So that's exactly what we wish for her and hope she'll share the news of the 'boost' on RankingHero :)