Tanger Poker Festival IX - final press release

It's been a great week of Poker at the Tangier Casino !​

On March 2nd, the first Coupe des Nations was held in order to kick off the festival. This competition brought six teams of six players from 6 different countries together around the Poker tables. Morocco, Portugal, France, Spain, The Netherlands and Belgium were represented for the first international competiton of this sort in Tangier and some big names of the Poker world did join in like Marcel Lüske or Guillaume Darcourt respectively leading the Dutch and French teams, Abdelhadi Kondah as the captain of Team Morocco, Juan Pastor from Spain or Joao Nunes from Portugal. The Belgian team was supposed to be lead by the November Niner, Pierre Neuville, but the latter got sick shortly after the WPT Brussels and had to cancel his trip together with Fabrice Halleux. They were replaced by Pieyre Maggi and Pascal Masset.

on the bubble in the Main Event

After a first series of sit'n'gos, France and Spain were leading while the Portuguese and Moroccan teams were struggling. The Portuguese were running bad and Team Morocco had to play without its captain for most of the day as AbdelhadiKondah got sick as well. Things got shaken up a bit in the second round during which Morocco scored a big comeback but the handicap accumulated during the first round was too big to beat France although Omar Karib managed to take down the final heads up match against the frenchman Stéphane Gerin.

The first Coupe des Nation trophy goes to France followed by Spain (silver medals) and Belgium (bronze medals). You can find all the results in the following link [http://tangermillionaire.com/category/tpf-ix-nations-cup/].

Team France - Cocorico !!

RESULTS :
France – 36 points
Spain – 32 points
Belgium – 31 points
Morocco – 30 points
NL – 25 points
Portugal – 14 points

Guillaume Darcourt (captain of Team France) with Bruno Soutavong

The day after the Coupe des Nations, Day 1A [http://tangermillionaire.com/category/tpf-ix-main-event-day-1a/] of the TPF IX Main Event cumulated a total of 106 entries and 29 players survived with Anas Tadini leading the remaining field with almost 13 starting stacks of 50k chips at the end of the day. It's been a pretty sick day for him and he stayed in the chipleader position for Day 2 as the biggest stack at the end of Day 1B was Victor Moreira's finishing on top of the 42 remaining out of 125 entries of the day [http://tangermillionaire.com/category/tpf-ix-main-event-day-1b/].

The last re-entries were possible until the first hand of Day 2 [http://tangermillionaire.com/category/tpf-ix-main-event-day-2/] and a total of 244 entries came together for this tournament smashing the DHS1million-guarantee by more than 50%. A bit more than DHS1.5million came together in the prize pool during the two days and DHS400.000 were promised to the winner via the payout structure proposed by the tournament director, Gerard Serra, awarding 26 ITM places.​

With 84 players at the beginning of the second day of the TPF IX Main Event, there was still a long way to go and the Dutch, Kai Niek Bongers, who won his seat in a Twitter competition, almost made it but he eventually made the bubble shortly before dinner break after getting crippled in pot KK<99 (runner runner striaght) and shoving his last big blind on the bubble with pocket 6s gainst four just-callers that all checked down the board.

Main Event final table

The game went on until the final nine players were left and the following players bagged chips around 2a.m. to come back for the sunday final table on Day 3 [http://tangermillionaire.com/category/tpf-ix-main-event-day-3/] with the Portuguese, Nuno Sales, leading the final 9 and the huge Day 1A leader, Anas Tadini, still in good shape :

Nuno Sales (Pt) – 2.283M
Daniel Perez (Sp) – 2.095M
Anas Tadini (Ma) – 2.005M
Manuel Sadornil (Sp) – 1.952M
Cristiano Lopes (Pt) – 1.030M
Jean-Michel Didier (F) – 1.026M
Soufiane Abbouti (B) – 690k
Jose Gomez (Sp) – 638k
Anouar Tahraoui (B) – 484k

Things went pretty fast at the beginning of the final table as Cristiano Lopes and Anouar Tahraoui got eliminated during the first hour of play and Jose Gomez followed soon after busting with pocket 9s to Jean-Michel Dider's kings. Manuel Sadornil was the next one to exit the tournament in 6th place finding himself in a tough preflop all in hand with QJ against Daniel Perez's AQ while Nuno Sales had extended his chiplead before losing QQ vs. a flopped set of 9s by Anas and a big flip AK<QQ against Jean-Michel Dider.​

The game went on 5 handed for a while with pretty even stacks before Nuno Sales eventually busted with A7 beaten against Anas Tadini's AK. Jean-Michel Dider was the next to exit the tournament and Soufiane Abbouti was leading the 3 handed phase with 5.5M followed by Anas who was nursing a stack of almost 5M. With a bit more than 12M chips in play, Daniel had a tough mission putting his 2M chips to work and eventually busted to the Belgian, Soufiane Abbouti, who went into the final heads up match against the Moroccan, Anas Tadini, with a big 9M/3.3M chiplead.

The SGO wins a tournament again !

While the end of the Main Event was nearing, a last 67-manned K.O. Side Event was also played on sunday and it was Jérôme Sgorrano (10 bounties) who took it down after a heads up deal with Ahmed Benharmach.

In the Main Event, Anas managed to come back by flipping better than Soufiane heads up and he ended up busting the Belgian after an undisclosed deal between the two last players.

Find all the results and infos on http://tangermillionaire.com/category/tanger-poker-festival-ix/ and extensive galleries of pictures are available on the Tanger Poker Club [http://www.facebook.com/TangerPokerClub].​

See you soon at the Tangier Casino !

final heads up match

Anas Tadini, winner of the Main Event with tournament director, Gerard Serra (left) & the Tanger Poker Club manager, Ghali Ababou (right)