You know what it’s like. You arrive at a hotel in a new city. There’s a routine to it all. You check the room, open and close all the draws; find the bible, turn the taps on and off, press any buttons and flick through all the channels on the TV remote control. Players arriving in Prague for the EPT did all that. The only thing left to do was to head to the PokerStars welcome party at the fashionable Club Celnice nightspot in the heart of Old Prague.



With over 100 PokerStars qualifiers making the trip to the Czech Republic, with the poker press in tow, it was wall to wall at Club Celnice as finger food and beer, DJs and dancers marked the unofficial start of the city’s inaugural EPT event, the biggest of its kind.



No track record perhaps, but registration at the Prague Hilton casino grows by the hour with the aforementioned 100 part of what is expected to be a field four times that size playing over the split day one. As I type a super satellite goes on in the basement poker room with many more players eager to find a way in on the action.

And just who will be among those writing the EPT’s name into the local history books? Team PokerStars Pro Katja Thater will be here on day 1a, whilst Dario Minieri, Luca Pagano, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier and Sebastian Ruthenburg sit down to fly the PokerStars flag on day 1b.

As always the PokerStars blog is here to bring you the stories of the event and will boldly try to bring you a flavour of what it’s like to be here.



So as the lights twinkle on the Prague-Zizkov TV tower which reaches hundreds of feet into the sky, and the night hawks try again and again to get to grips with the pronunciation of the few Czech words we know, the town tucks itself in for the night.

All we can do now is wait. It all starts on Monday at 12 noon local time.

All photos (c) Neil Stoddart