Greg “FBT” Mueller, a former professional hockey player and now professional poker player, won the second $1,500 Epic Poker Pro/Am tournament and with it a $20,000 seat to Tuesday’s Main Event but his victory could be overshadowed by the disqualification of a player after the nine seats had been awarded.
The inaugural Pro/Am event attracted 190 players which meant the top nine finishers all received a $20,000 seat to the Main Event and there was also plenty of money to distribute too but the second Pro/Am event held over the weekend only attracted 97 players, meaning it did not even reach its guarantee. The low attendance has been blamed in part by the fact EPT Barcelona just finished and the WPT Grand Prix de Paris is currently taking place, along with the PokerStars WCOOP, each taking hundreds if not thousands of potential players out of the loop. The Epic Poker League still paid out nine seats to Mueller, Phil Hellmuth, Nam Le, Andreas Hoivold, Sean Getzwiller, Brandon Meyers, Russell Rosenbum, Jeremy Ausmus and Michael DiVita.
Earlier this morning news spread on Twitter that Jamie Kaplan, who finished tenth and was the bubble boy, had earned a reprieve and was going to be put into the Main Event after one of the nine seat winners was disqualified from the event. This is a breaking story and details are yet to be confirmed in an official capacity but it appears that Michael DiVita, who finished in eighth place, is the disqualified man. We say this because a thread appeared on the Two Plus Two forums that claims (and provides links to his publicly available profile) in 1991 DiVita was convicted of child molestation at the age of 33 and that he was also arrested on similar charges in 2008 but the case was dropped after the alleged victim would no longer testify.
One can currently only assume the two events are linked especially when the Epic Poker League spoke out about the potential banning of Chino Rheem after it was revealed he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his fellow professional players and was involved in scamming at least one of them. As soon as we have concrete news we will update this page and let you know.
