It's been an up and down day for Tony Dobson. The PokerStars qualifier from London, England, tangled with Joao Barbosa during the opening couple of levels, with the EPT Warsaw champion coming out on top, before Dobson hauled it back up to somewhere near his starting stack.
Then he chipped down again through a series of card-dead-must-play-something moments, before working it back up to 12,000 or so. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Dobson spoke to the video blog team to earn his five minutes of PokerStars.tv fame. But when the video dropped into our inbox, there had been some kind of captioning error and we were preparing to introduce the world to Toby Dobson, a player who looked and sounded a lot like Tony. Another bad beat.
"That's typical," the real Dobson explained. "The last - and only other - time I played poker on TV, they got my name wrong as well. I was Tony Dossen."
Thankfully our team can fix these slight oversights double quick smart, and you can scroll down to meet the correctly-captioned Dobson, a former full-time professional poker player, who took a break from the game, gathered thoughts, finances and rich talents, before re-curving towards the investment markets and returning to poker as a recreational pursuit. He won a PokerStars satellite to join the field on his first EPT and has gone in the right direction again late on day 1a, up to around 20,000 at last count.
Watch EPT Deauville S5: Interview with Toby Dobson Day 1a on PokerStars.tv
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Tournament update: Robert Cohen is out. The record will state that he got his aces cracked by a much inferior holding, but neither player did anything wrong on this hand. Cohen raised from mid position and Juha Helppi called on the button. The flop came Jh-Qs-Ks and Cohen checked. Helppi bet 3,500 and Cohen shoved for his last 15,000 or so. Helppi called in a blink and tabled Js-10s for bottom pair plus an up and down straight-flush draw. He hit one of his numerous outs when the 8s rivered and Cohen's day was done. Helppi is up to more than 40,000.
