Welcome to the 2018 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS Russia Poker Festival
For the second year in a row, the partypoker LIVE brand is heading to Russia for the MILLIONS Russia festival at the Sochi Casino and Resort in the Krasnaya Polyana region. The exclusive venue opened the doors one year ago and has quickly become a vital host for all bigger poker festivals in Russia, thus it was just a logical choice to partner up with the quickly rising partypoker LIVE brand.
The 12-day festival in Sochi will feature a total of 15 events and six of them have a guaranteed prize pool. The highlight of the schedule is RUB300,000+18,000 Main Event (~$4,900) that comes with a massive guarantee of 300 Million Russian Rubles (approximately $4.7 Million). The Main Event kicks off on Tuesday, August 7, and is certain to attract the biggest names of the local poker scene along with plenty of well-known poker aficionados of the international circuit.
2018 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS Sochi schedule
| Event | Buy-In (RUB) | ~ Buy-in (USD) | Guaranteed Prize Pool (RUB) | ~ Guaranteed Prize Pool (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | 60,000+6,000 | $946+95 | 60,000,000 | $946,100 |
| Main Event | 300,000+18,000 | $4,731+284 | 300,000,000 | $4,700,000 |
| Triton Poker High Roller | 3,000,000 | $47,305 | 120,000,000 | $1,900,000 |
| Triton Poker Super High Roller | 6,000,000 | $94,611 | 120,000,000 | $1,900,000 |
| Finale | 300,000+3,000 | $473+47 | 30,000,000 | $473,100 |
| High Roller | 600,000+18,000 | $9,461+284 | 60,000,000 | $946,100 |
On top of the regular event schedule, the 2018 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS Russia will also include two Triton High Roller events that will bring some of poker's superstars to Sochi with the Triton founders Richard Yong and Paul Phua, Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Mustapha Kanit and Triple Crown winner Niall Farrell. A host of German High Roller regulars are also expected to join the action such as Manig Loeser, Dietrich Fast, Aymon Hata, Johannes Becker and Koray Aldemir.
The Triton Super High Roller series comes fresh off a very successful festival at the Landing Casino in Jeju a few days ago and the entire feature table set was moved from South Korea to Russia in order to provide high-stakes live stream action in the upcoming days and until the end of the festival in Sochi. You can check out a summary of all the action and videos from Jeju right here on PokerNews.
Several partypoker LIVE ambassadors will be taking part in the tournaments in Anatoly Filatov, Dzmitry Urbanovich, Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier, latest addition Ludovic Geilich, and Sam Trickett. With several promotions leading to the festival, two of them, in particular, will catch the eyes of poker pros from near and far.
The Main Event has a last longer competition for the first 100 players to enter the tournament with PP Live Dollars and the last man standing will receive $100,000 in cash. Several online satellites on partypoker now award the new multi-functional currency that can be used to buy into any partypoker LIVE sponsored events.
Filatov, Trickett and Grospellier will be part of the "From Russia to the Caribbean" final in Sochi. Nine online Freeroll winners will play against each other and the three partypoker ambassadors in a six-may 12 player Sit And Go. The winner takes home a $12,000 package for the upcoming Caribbean Poker Party in November.
Open Side Event Draws 1,000 Entries
The first of six tournaments with a guaranteed prize pool at the 2018 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS Russia poker festival at the Sochi Casino and Resort was the "Open" with a buy-in of RUB60,000+6,000 (~$946+95) and the event featured a total of five starting days. The strongest turnout of the four days with regular structure was Day 1C with 267 entries, of which 91 advanced to Day 2.
Among the big stacks of the four regular flights were Evgeniy Charkasov (10,575,000), Aleksandr Denisov (10,445,000), Viktor Kudinov (9,420,000), Eduards Kudrjavecs (8,295,000), Vitaly Lunkin (7,650,000), Oleksii Kravchuk (7,170,000), Anton Yakuba (6,680,000), Daniil Kiselev (6,465,000) and partypoker ambassador Dzmitry Urbanovich (5,495,000).
2018 partypoker MILLIONS LIVE Russia Open Starting Days at a Glance
| Starting Day | Entries | Survivors |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1A | 206 | 56 |
| Day 1B | 167 | 45 |
| Day 1C | 267 | 91 |
| Day 1D | 210 | 62 |
| Day 1E | 150 | 76 |
With 850 entries after the first four flights, the Turbo Heat 1E that kicked off at 10 a.m. local time on Monday, August 6th, 2018, required another 150 entries to hit the magic 1,000 and sure enough as many entries were generated when the registration officially closed. Dusk Till Dawn's Simon Trumper was among the last to jump in and bagged up more than four times the starting stack among the 76 survivors, not far away from Mikhail Galitskiy's 4,715,000.
A total of 239 hopefuls returned just after 3 p.m. local time into the new main tournament room at Casino Sochi and half of the field would leave empty-handed as just the top 119 spots were guaranteed at least RUB162,000 (~$2,540) for their efforts. The winner will walk home with a top prize of RUB10,800,000 (~$169,395) and the partypoker LIVE trophy.
Several big names were among those to return to their seats only to run out of chips early on Day 2. Vladimir Troyanovskiy had been all in for five big blinds with pocket eights, Ludovic Geilich reshoved for 20 big blinds with pocket aces and Ming Juen Teoh looked both up with the superior stack and pocket tens. Geilich's first live event as partypoker ambassador ultimately ended with a cruel ten on the board and he joined fellow Scotsman Niall Farrell, who fired several bullets without finding a bag.
Farrell's penultimate attempt on Day 1d the previous evening saw him run out of chips after the registration had closed. He first turned a flush with nine-five suited only for defending MILLIONS Russia champion Aleksandr Gofman to river the nut flush with ace-nine off suit and Farrell pushed blind the next hand with ten-deuce. Daniil Kiselev called on the button with the dreadful ace-nine to flop top two pair and leave his opponent drawing dead on the turn already.
Others that were ousted well before the money were Ivan Soshnikov, Dmitry Vitkind, David Urban, Arseniy Karmatskiy, Matous Houzvicek, Oleg Titov, Dmitry Gromov, Daria Feshchenko, Sergey Rybachenko, Roman Korenev, Vadim Lipovka, Gleb Tremzin, Ionut-Flavius Voinea, Andrey Zaichenko, as well as partypoker's Philipp Gruissem and Anatoly Filatov.
The PokerNews team will be on the floor to provide live updates of the Main Event and the Triton Super High Roller tournaments, along with some highlight pieces throughout the entire festival.