Paris Main Event was won by Alan Goasdoue. After a relatively short Day 4, Goasdoue defeated fellow Frenchman Jean-Luc Labryga in a brief heads-up match to take home the shimmering silver trophy and €288,830.
Goasdoue, who has been playing poker professionally for the past five months and has been playing poker since he was 18 years old, had just $39,562 in Hendon Mob earnings when he decided to play in the European Poker Tour (EPT) Paris festival after winning the FPS Main Event.
Goasdoue managed to climb past several players
Including fellow Frenchmen Thibault Reverdito (7th – €44,990) and Roger Taieb (4th – €98,870), Europeans Oleksii Natoptanyi (6th – €58,490), Christopher Dowling (5th – €76,050), and Elias Fisz (3rd – €128,530), before ultimately defeating chip leader Labryga at the beginning of
In an interview with a winner, Goasdoue stated, “I’m pretty calm right now.” Since the beginning of the tournament, everything has been going well for me, and even when I was being dominated, I have always been able to survive with double-up.
I stayed focused even though I had the last stack going into today’s final. I was fortunate to win because I knew how my head-up opponent was playing.”
Final Table Action
The FPS Paris Main Event, one of the first events to kick off the first EPT Paris stop, had a record-breaking 2,071 participants and a prize pool of €1,988,160, breaking the previous attendance record for the FPS Main set at the 2022 EPT Prague. If not for the Hyatt Regency Paris Etoile’s capacity limitations, the field probably would have been even larger.
After Vasyl Zabrodskyy’s late-night elimination, seven players returned to complete the final table on Day 4. Zabrodskyy’s pocket sixes were ineffective against the ace-jack of the eventual runner-up.
Before entering Day 4 with the largest stack and his run-good just beginning, Labryga was chip leader on Day 1. In the first level of play, Labryga beat Reverdito’s top pair with just an ace-high on the flop, but Reverdito was eliminated in seventh place by a runner-runner straight.
After Natoptanyi and Dowling both lost, Labryga beat Taieb, who had playedfully teased Labryga throughout the final table prior to his fourth-place finish, by a wide margin.
Goasdoue was quiet most of the day until he got pocket nines and looked up a shove by Fisz with ace-eight. Fisz couldn’t improve, so he fell in third and set up a French heads-up match.
The oldest and youngest players at the final table, Labryga and Goasdoue, had nearly equal chips going into heads-up play. However, Goasdoue quickly took the lead after making a few hands, including two full houses. When Labryga open-jammed on the button with ace-eight, he was down to a short stack. Goasdoue looked him up with nines, which turned out to be the holding of the day as they once more held up to win Goasdoue the tournament.
The Poker Stars qualifier’s first major live score, just a few months after switching from online poker, was the career-best score.
“My objective was to play all the more live occasions from now on,” said Goasdoue. “I’ve known for a very long time that I can put on a big show. As the saying goes, I’ve checked the box now! At the start of the tournament, I said that I would win with one bullet in the FPS and one bullet in the EPT (Main Event). I’m halfway there, then!”