What could be lovelier than springtime in Paris? The Unibet Open coming to Paris, is what! We are offering you a chance to fall in love with poker all over again in the City of Romance from May 3rd-6th as the Unibet Open lands in France. It’s going to be magnifique!

Our first ever French outing will introduce the legendary Unibet spirit to a country already renowned for its joie de vivre – with poker and partying a-plenty, Paris is the place to be this May.

Our venue for the week will be the newly opened Cercle Cadet Poker Room, right in the bustling heart of this beautiful capital city. Hosting 20 tables and offering a variety of cash games and tournaments in addition to the Main Event, the Cercle Cadet is the ideal venue for playing poker in central Paris – c’est tres jolie! See the Cercle Cadet website for more info.

Our players’ home for the week will be the luxurious 4* Hotel Concorde La Fayette, nestled between the business district of La Defense and the shopping district of the Triangle d’Or, close to the Champs Elysees. One of the largest hotels in Paris, the Hotel Concorde La Fayette offers spectacular views across Paris and every amenity a poker player could possibly want, including a private health club and the exclusive “La Vue” bar 33 floors above the city. Perfectly located for sightseeing, the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay are all within easy walking distance. Visit Concorde Hotels for more info.

Qualifiers will be running from late February on Unibet – click here for all the details. Vive la France!

2011 Leaderboard winner Tim Verbon

This year, there will be no deductions from the Main Event prize pools – all the prizes will be completely on us. We are offering players the chance to play a complete season of Unibet Opens for free, with all expenses paid to every Unibet Open event in 2013.

The top three players on the Leaderboard at the end of the 2012 season will win Unibet sponsorship for 2013 to the following events:

1st place – 4 Unibet Open Live packages and 3 Unibet Open Online seats

2nd place - 3 Unibet Open Live packages

3rd place - 3 Unibet Open Online seats

Players can accumulate points by playing in Unibet Open Live Main Events, making Unibet Open Online final tables, and by playing on Unibet and earning VIP points between live events. Please click here for further details, and good luck at the tables!

The year is almost over, and the 2011 Unibet Open season feels like the distant past already. But never fear! The Unibet Open is set to make 2012 its best ever year with four amazing live stops, three online legs, a brand new Leaderboard format with no prize pool deductions, and a plethora of new and exciting offers for players.

Never mind if you didn’t get what you wanted for Christmas – we’ve got some belated gifts that will be sure to please even the most discerning poker player. We already announced that the first live leg will take place in February in one of our favourite cities, Prague, and we are now pleased to announce that the rest of the Unibet year is going to look like so:

Unibet Open Prague – 16-19 February

Unibet Open Online One – 25 March

Unibet Open Paris – 3-6 May

Unibet Open Online Two – 29 July

Unibet Open London – August (dates TBC)

Unibet Open Online Three – 4 November

Unibet Open 5th Anniversary Special Edition (venue TBC)

The Main Event buy-in will remain the same as last season – €1,500+150, with a full package including accommodation, meals and €300 travel money worth €2,500. The structure with its generous 20,000 starting stack will also remain the same as in 2011, and most events will have a cap of 300. The ever-popular Unibet Open side events will include in 2012 an exciting selection of Omaha events, team events and ladies’ events as well as the classic NLH events.

The annual Unibet Open Leaderboard will take a slightly different format in 2012. There will be no prize pool deductions from the Main Events, and rather than cash prizes, players will be competing for an awesome prize – more on that to come in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for news.

All season, 5% of the prize pool at Unibet Open Live Main Events was withheld for the top ten players on the Leaderboard. After four events, the total Leaderboard prize pool came to a whopping €93,350, which has been divided as follows:

Pim van Riet (left) was frontrunner for much of the season after making two consecutive final tables at Barcelona and Dublin, but his failure to cash at Riga allowed two other Dutchmen, Tim Verbon and Peter Harkes, to overtake him, and he eventually finished in third place overall. A fourth Dutchman, Pim van Wieringen, bubbled the Riga final table to award him 78 Leaderboard points and fourth place at the end of the season, while fifth place on the Leaderboard was taken by Dutch-speaking Belgian Laurens De Smet.

The only nation other than the Netherlands who can claim more than one spot in the top ten is Denmark – UO Online 5 champion Henrik Hecklen and three-time UO Online finalist Soren Blanner are tied for eighth place on 147 points each. The UK’s Alex Rousso was the only Unibet Ambassador to make the Leaderboard cut after a solid performance this season, and he gets €5,601 for his efforts.

By midway through Day 2 at Riga, well inside the money, it became apparent that it was going to be a battle for the top spot between Tim Verbon and Peter Harkes. The crucial hand took place with 23 players left. Verbon went all in with A-Q and after some deliberation Harkes called him with K-4 suited – he said afterwards that he’d called purely for the sake of the Leaderboard points. Verbon doubled up and although he exited not long after, the extra few places he laddered were enough to win him 58 points for 20th place. When added to the points for his 19th place finish in Malta, a fourth place finish in UO Online 1 and first place in UO Online 3, plus 30 points for amassing the requisite VIP points between live events, Verbon’s excellent all-round performance was enough to secure him 208 points. If Harkes had won the hand, it would have been him in first place and Verbon would have been relegated to second.

Peter Harkes won’t be particularly disappointed by his second place Leaderboard payout – for a man who didn’t play half the Online legs or Unibet Open Malta, second place is an extraordinary feat indeed. Fifth place at Unibet Open Dublin was actually the young Dutchman’s first ever live cash, and he followed it up weeks later with his second ever live cash, first place at Riga. He gets an extra €14,002.50 for his efforts, on top of the roughly €115,000 he made from his two final table appearances.

To see the full 2011 Leaderboard results, please click here. All the Leaderboard winners will have their prizes paid to their Unibet accounts after Christmas, and the full details of next year’s Leaderboard structure will be published in the coming weeks.

Many congratulations to Tim Verbon and all the other Leaderboard winners – we hope you’ve all enjoyed the Unibet Open 2011 season as much as we have, and we look forward to seeing you again next season.

The Royal Casino was a spectacular venue for Harkes’ first major live win. The lush gilded interior of the tournament, glittering with chandeliers, was just a lovely place to play poker, and the generosity of the casino extended to offering a consolation prize to the first player out on Day 1a. Paulo Rodrigues was the recipient of the wooden spoon provided in association with Welcome2Riga.com – a trip out to the Latvian countryside to shoot guns. What better way to let off steam after a bad beat.

Going all the way wasn’t plain sailing for Harkes – at one point on Day 1a, he flopped three sets in a row and lost every time, reducing him from a big stack to just 8,500 in the space of a few minutes. While Harkes recovered from his setbacks and went on to be crowned champion, others did not fare so well. Players who came and went before the money included Unibet Ambassadors Alex Rousso and Paul Valkenburg, EPT finalist Paul Berende and Dutch model Ancilla Tilia. Also failing to make the money was back-to-back Unibet Open finalist Pim van Riet, formerly the frontrunner for the annual Leaderboard. His failure to cash at Riga cost him the Leaderboard top spot and it looks as though he’s finished the season in third place behind fellow Dutchman Tim Verbon and fellow back-to-back finalist Harkes.

Finland dominated the top of the chip counts in the early stages of the tournament – three of the four biggest stacks going into Day 2 were Finnish – but it didn’t last for long. Overall Day 2 chip leader Jami Juutila and Day 1b chip leader Teemu Autio didn’t even make the money. Ilkka Heikkila made it as far as 18th place, but it was only Lithuanian Vytautas Milvydas – third in chips going into Day 2 – who made it as far as the final table.

The bubble was a swift but dramatic affair – dramatic largely because of the twin fates of the only husband and wife team playing the event, Henri and Katri Kasper. Henri was just a few places from the money when he got his stack in with against Andy Bell’s and looked set to double up when he flopped a full house against Bell’s trips. But the full board ran out giving Bell quads on the river, and Kasper busted out. Just a few minutes later, wife Katri busted out too. It was a straightforward coinflip – against Peter Harkes’ – but it was no doubt made much worse by the fact that Katri busted out in the last place before the money, the official bubble spot.

Once the remaining 39 players were in the money, the pace of play increased markedly. The chip lead swung back and forth: at the dinner break Jarkko Mammela led; two hours later it was the turn of Loek van Wely. Within a few hours, 30 players including Unibet Ambassador Atanas Gueorguiev, EPT finalist Koen De Visscher and brand new Leaderboard winner Tim Verbon had been awarded payouts ranging from 2,151 LVL (€3,082) to 7,220 LVL (€10,344) and sent home. The last exit of the night took place at 11.50pm, just in time for the midnight start of the legendary Unibet Open Players’ Party – Pim van Wieringen succumbed in 10th place to dominant Dutchman Peter Harkes, and play was over for the day. Nine players remained.

Peter Harkes carried a substantial chip lead into the final day – at 1,720,500 he had nearly a third of the chips in play, and only one other player – Maksim Martynov on 1,001,000 – had even broken the million mark. Despite doubling up several players during the course of the final, Harkes never lost the chip lead once during the entire course of the final table.

The final table kicked off with double ups for short stacks David Janssen and Vytautas Milvydas, and with the stacks a little more even it took almost two hours for the first finalist to hit the rail. The ninth place finisher was Ricardo Klaassen, who shoved with and was picked off by Maksim Martynov holding . He took home 8,295 LVL (€11,884). This was one of the few eliminations that was not the work of Peter Harkes – Harkes was soon responsible for the exits of Rytis Grunovas in eighth place (9,524 LVL/€13,645), Loek van Wely in seventh place (10,753 LVL/€15,408) and Vytautas Milvydas in sixth place (13,211 LVL/€18,929), all of these in quick succession. By now Harkes had around half the chips in play.

The pattern was only broken when David Janssen’s pocket were outdrawn by Jarkko Mammela’s , the board running out to send the Belgian home with 16,898 LVL (€24,211) for fifth place. It wasn’t the start of a great comeback for Mammela though – he soon became fourth place finisher after failing to outflip Maksim Martynov, Mammela’s playing Martynov’s , and took home 21,506 LVL (€30,817).

Three handed, Harkes remained the chip leader but there wasn’t much in it between him and Maksim Martynov. Arkadiusz Olszowy by contrast continued to nurse a relatively short stack, as he had all day. So it came as something of a surprise when Harkes and Martynov almost immediately began to get involved with one another. They had one minor scuffle – Harkes won – before all the chips went in. Martynov opened and Harkes reraised before Martynov went all in with . Harkes snap-called with . There was no help for Martynov on the board and he busted out in third place for 29,187 LVL (€41,814).

Harkes had more than a 6:1 chip lead over Arkadiusz Olszowy when the heads up began, and it looked like it could all be over immediately when Olszowy went all in on the first hand. The players had seen a flop and the chips had gone in, Olszowy holding Q-9 against Harkes’ K-9 – but an ace on the river chopped the pot. A few minutes later Olszowy doubled up with against Harkes’ , and was now on 1.45 million to Harkes’ 4.65 million – still at a disadvantage, but now relatively deep.

After an hour of slowly chipping away at Olszowy’s stack, Harkes found a dream spot. He min-raised from the button and Olszowy called to see a flop, which he liked enough to go all in. Harkes snap-called with for the straight, and Olszowy could only muster for top pair. The turn and river were not enough to save Olszowy, and he had to settle for second place and 42,705 LVL (€61,176). Harkes meanwhile took the trophy, a 62,829 LVL (€90,016) payday and third place on the Leaderboard, the full official result of which will be published in the next few days.

Click here to see the final table.

Click here to see the prize pool and payouts.

The Unibet Open 2011 season is now over, and what a season it was – four live main events, four online ones, dozens of side events, thousands of players, and an overwhelming party atmosphere bringing the whole lot together. At the Unibet Open, even if you lose, you’re still a winner.

For some, everything went right and they went home with six figure paydays, some rather nice trophies for their cabinets, and the sheer bragging rights of claiming a Unibet Open title. For others, things didn’t go quite as well – sometimes it doesn’t matter how well you play, the cards are just not on your side. At the Unibet Open, we know just how brutal a really bad beat can feel – so we thought we’d keep a little something for the player who suffered the absolute worst that tournament poker can throw at you.

All season, players busting out of our Unibet Open Live Main Events on particularly nasty beats have been reporting their misfortune to the tournament directors, who have in turn been logging the hands to find the worst bad beat of all, with the unluckiest player of the season receiving a Rolex Submariner watch worth over €4,000 as consolation. Now that the season is over we can announce that Simon Wilenius was the recipient of the single worst beat this season.

The offending hand took place at Unibet Open Malta. Simon Wilenius got his stack in with pocket kings against Pierre Milan’s pocket queens preflop. Both players flopped a set, but Milan rivered the case queen to make quads while Wilenius’ hand made a full house. This is how it went down, in Simon’s own words:

Players in the Hand: Pierre Milan and Simon Wilenius

Simon says:

Blinds were 100/200. Milan raised under the gun for 550, guy in UTG+2 call, I three-bet to 1,875 from cutoff-2, Milan four-bet and made it 4,875-ish, guy who limped folded, I took my time, we had played a couple hands with each other so a little history between us. Then I five-bet all in with around 30,000-ish. He thought long and called….

Wilenius:
Milan:

Board:
Turn:
River:

All we can think to say is: ouch. We can’t do anything about how the cards, but we can do a little to ease the pain. So it is with considerable pleasure that we are awarding Simon the Rolex as consolation for his bad run. We extend both commiserations and congratulations to Simon, and we look forward to seeing him and his brand new wrist candy at future Unibet Opens.

Czech your diaries now – we are pleased to announce that the first Unibet Open stop of 2012 has been confirmed!

After two highly successful events in 2009 and 2010, we are delighted to be descending on Prague for a third time from 16-19 February 2012. Last year Henri Ojala won €157,000 for taking the top spot and the year before that Fuat Can took home €167,500 for raising the trophy. In 2012 we will be crowning our third Unibet Open Prague champion – play your cards right and it could be you.

We are happy to confirm that, as in previous years, the luxurious Hilton hotel in the very heart of the city will be both tournament venue and home to our players over the four days. As anyone who’s been to previous Unibet Opens will already know, there are few venues in Europe as great to play and stay in.

And as far as après-poker goes, Prague is the perfect place to be. Heaven for the discerning poker player in search of entertainment, Prague is a perfect compliment to the legendary Unibet Open hospitality, and you can expect some spectacular parties as well as easy access to the many attractions that Prague has to offer.

For full info on Unibet Open Prague 2012, click here.

Satellites are already underway on Unibet Poker – click here for all the details, and see you in Prague!

The grand finale of the Unibet Open 2011 season is just a couple weeks away, and you’d better get your skates on if you’re planning to qualify – there are just two satellites left to go!

This is your absolute last chance to win a package to Unibet Open Riga in our online satellites. The last €255+20 Weekly Sunday Final takes place on November 20th and the last €100+10 Weekly Tuesday Final is on November 22nd – and after that, you’re just going to have to make your own way to Riga if you want to join us at what promises to be one of this year’s best poker tournaments.

If you don’t fancy coughing up the buy-in to either of those, there’s still time to satellite into the Weekly Finals – daily satellites to the Weekly Finals are running on Unibet Poker right now at every level from freeroll on up. Click here for all the details.

Good luck, and see you in Riga!

Last Weekly Sunday Final – November 20th, 20:30 CET
Last Weekly Tuesday Final – November 22nd, 20:30 CET

Alexander Debus last night performed the extraordinary feat of taking down his second Unibet Open Online of 2011, just a few months after claiming the title for Unibet Open Online 4.

The event was the biggest Unibet Open Online of the season, drawing a total of 110 players and generating a €33,000 prize pool – smashing the €25,000 guarantee. Debus’ second win netted him €9,900 and 40 points towards the Leaderboard.

Since the start of 2011 Debus has scored over €200,000 in live tournament winnings including second place in a major tournament in Monte Carlo and 137th place in the WSOP Main Event. Add to that €17,400 for his two UOO wins, not to mention the unprecedented glory of two Unibet Open titles in a single season, and 2011 is shaping up to be a vintage year for the young German.

Ten places paid out, with all the finalists getting a share of the prize pool and Leaderboard points.

It seems like only yesterday that we were crowning Henrik Hecklen champion of Unibet Open Online 5 – but there’s no time for nostalgia, because Unibet Open Online 6 is almost upon us.

The final online leg of the 2011 Unibet Open takes place at 19:00 CET on November 13th. This is your last chance to claim a Unibet Open Online title this season – and with a €25,000 prize pool guaranteed, it’s not just about the glory. Henrik Hecklen picked up €9,090 for his win in UO Online 5, as well as 40 points towards the Leaderboard. The expected prize pool for the Leaderboard is €100,000, and the top ten Leaderboard finishers will get a share of the money.

To qualify for UO Online 6, you’ll need to satellite or buy into one of these tournaments:

Mon-Wed 22:00 CET: €55+5 daily UOO Final Satellite (use UO ticket or cash to buy-in)

Thu-Sun 22:00 CET: €100+10 UOO Final Satellite (use UO ticket or cash to buy-in)

Qualifiers to these satellites are running daily at every level from freeroll up. Could you be crowned the winner of Unibet Open Online 6? There’s only one way to find out…

Terms and Conditions:

• Each player may only win one seat to any Unibet Open ONLINE event

• All satellite qualifiers will receive a tournament specific ticket feeding directly to the next Unibet Open Online event.

• Tickets to the event are not transferable and may not be exchanged for cash.

• Tickets won to a specific event may not be exchanged for a package/seat to a future Unibet Open event.

• If you win a ticket and you’re unable to play the event, your prize will be forfeited

• €25,000 guaranteed prize pool.

• The top 10 finishing positions of the Unibet Open Online will be awarded leaderboard points towards the yearly Unibet Open Leaderboard. Check the Unibet Open website for further details: http://www.unibetopen.com/leaderboard/.

• Unibet reserves the right to change these conditions at any time.