There are at least three very well-known Dutch poker players. Rob Hollink was born in Enschede and is a huge force in tournaments. Hollink has cashed twelve times at the WSOP and twice at the WPT, including fifth in the Season 3 WPT Championship at Bellagio. This all pales next to his win in the European Poker Tour's Grand Finale in Season 1. He took first in a very tough field, earning $845,190.
Noah Boeken is a former high-level Magic: the Gathering player - he won the European Championship in 2000. Since turning to poker, he's cashed twice at the WSOP, including a final table appearance at the $2,500 limit Hold'em event. Like Hollink, he's also won an EPT title - Season 1's Scandinavian Open, defeating Ram "Crazy Horse" Vaswani heads-up. Boeken is good friends with poker pro and Magic player David Williams, and through Boeken met his mentor - fellow Dutchman, Marcel Luske, probably the most well-known Dutch poker player in the world.
Luske, known as "The Flying Dutchman", is known for singing at the table and wearing upside-down sunglasses to see the cards better - and even with his own PokerSpecs sunglasses named for him, specifically designed to see hole cards, he still wears them upside down! Luske is known for making 14th in the 2003 WSOP Main Event and then 10th just one year later, narrowly missing a television appearance both times. He was runner-up in the $5,000 Seven Card Stud event at the 2004 series, and took 7th in the EPT Season 2's Grand Finale. His most recent major wins were the Hall of Fame Poker Classic in Paris in July 2005, in which he earned $153,760, and the $3,000 preliminary No Limit event at the Five Diamond World Poker Classic, which netted him $315,630.
So what types of poker are offered at Holland Casino Utrecht?
"Texas Hold'em - €10- 20 limit and €5-5 no limit during the week, and on our big event on the last Sunday of the month, €20-40 limit and €10-10 no limit," says Richard Baars, poker manager at Holland Casino Utrecht. (Note: €1 = $1.29.) Baars says that the tournament buyins range from €100 up to €1,000. "[We have] weekly cash games from 8 p.m. till 3 a.m," Baars says. "On Thursday, a tournament of 60 players. Last Sunday there was a tournament from 3 p.m. till 3 a.m. The poker is getting bigger; therefore we"re organizing a big event in January 2007, the Dom Classics." The Dom Classics was a series of five poker events from January 23-27. It started with the Dutch Heads-Up Championship, a €250+25 heads-up event limited to 128 players - heads-up being a rarity in tournaments. The finals for this event took place on January 28. Next was a €100+10 no-limit re-buy tournament. After that was a €250+25 freezeout, then a €200+20 limit Hold'em event with a single re-buy and a single add-on. Finally, on Saturday, January 27, the main event took place - a two-day €1,000+50 buyin freezeout, finishing on Sunday.
Following the main event, the Holland Casino gave a MVP award to a player, who was then granted 2% of the total prize money. This award is earned by finishing well in any of the five events. Plus, any player who pre-registered for all five tournaments received a 20 MVP point bonus - equivalent to finishing first in an event.
The other major event in the Netherlands in the Master Classics of Poker. This year's event will be November 2- 10 and is also run by Holland Casino.
The 2006 event was a record success. Taking place at the beautiful Holland Casino Amsterdam, this nine-day poker series kicked off with 280 players for the Limit Hold'em with Rebuy event. The following day, 290 players arrived for the No Limit event with unlimited rebuys - and there were a staggering 515 of those! Even more players showed up - 302 - for the no-limit, single rebuy event. Even the Pot Limit Omaha event the day after that did not see much reduced attendance - 284 players entered. Unusually for an Omaha event, this one offered unlimited re-buys as well, and players re-bought 543 times. After these preliminary events came the main event - a €5,000 No Limit Hold'em tournament, which attracted 345 players. The roster read like an all star game of European poker, with one Canadian ringer thrown in: Ram "Crazy Horse" Vaswani, Isabelle "No Mercy" Mercier (from Quebec), the entire Hendon Mob, Tony G, Marcel Luske, Noah Boeken, Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott and Andy Black, among many others.
It was Alex Jalali of Germany who rose to the top of this tough field to win the €700,000 first-place prize. To get there, he had to best Jan "The Balrog" Sjavik, the Nordic pro player with the best nickname ever, and Keith "The Camel" Hawkins, of Ascot, England, whose nickname is somewhat less cool than the Balrog. Jalali only has two other cashes to his name, but look for him to prove himself on the Euro circuit in 2007.
