Live Poker
Dan Murariu, aka ‘Agentu’ is a known name to the poker players in Romania. This month, he set up a new record in a tournament of a great prestige in the European circuit, a tournament that surely is of a good omen for the Romanian player. Murariu is the only poker player in the history of Unibet Poker Open to reach a number of 5 final tables in this competition – the last one in the Paris event in May.
So far, he has succeeded to win a tournament, two placements on the fifth, one on the seventh and one on the eighth for the series of the tournaments hosted by Unibet. Thanks to these results, the Romanian player is now a person whom the video cameras are after and very much respected by the other players. During the Paris tournament, he found himself many times at the table being televised and the commentators applauded him, saying that he had been one of the main favorites of the tournament title even since the first day of the event. It seems that they were not very far from the truth, as Dan was close to a new Unibet title.
The placement on the seventh propelled Dan Murariu 331 positions higher, to the 218 in the ‘Player of the Year’ category, which includes all the poker players in the world. With his winnings in the amount of 768,176 dollars, he is on the fourth place among the poker players in Romania, surpassed only by Ionel Anton, Mihai Manole and Toni Judet.
Lately, Liviu Ignat also had an excellent course during the live tournaments. After he had excelled in everything possible that is online, he started playing in more and more live events. His latest remarkable result is the place 42 out of 665 players at EPT Monte Carlo. This one followed a 10th place at EPT Prague, a 12th at EPT Deauville and, of course, after the famous televised game ‘PartyPoker Big Game’, where he awed the entire world with his playing abilities.
Online Poker
During the month of May, the world of the online poker has been full of a series of tournaments, offered by PokerStarts. This series is called SCOOP. For a better understanding, we can only say this: 40 events and 30,000,000 dollars in guaranteed prizes, which prizes had been exceeded after a few days since the series started. Moreover, this series of tournaments has become a world record, as it is the largest series of tournaments of online poker that ever existed.
The players in Romania have had outstanding results at this event. At the end of the tournament series, there were 10,468 Romanian players taking part in these events. They placed themselves 1,324 times on paid positions and had 11 final tables. Up to this point, our players have won almost 867,000 dollars. The only final table won by Romania is owed to Respect4life.
Iulian Ruxăndescu is the player who won the highest amounts of money during the SCOOP events and, at the same time, he is the one who made the biggest ‘waves’ online. He reached a heads-up with Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom whom he dominated – unfortunately, he could not play against the bad cards and so Isildur1 was the one favored to win here. Ruxăndescu tried to obtain a good result at the event with the highest buy-in the series (10.300 USD) – but it was bad luck: he played for circa 6 hours and won nothing. Even before the good results at SCOOP, Iulian Ruxăndescu was a well-known poker player; he participated in the Romanian Masters of Poker, a tournament that gathered together the best poker players in Romania (we hope that we will have a second edition at the end of this year).
Besides SCOOP, a player nobody knows much about is playing this month at the highest stakes and with the best world players on PokerStars. His nickname is Phisherman36, from Romania. The only information we have about him is his real name – Andrei Pescaru. A certain thing, the Romanian player is stirring a lot of discussions in many communities of players worldwide; should we look at the mystery surrounding him and how he approaches the game, we could call him very well an Isildur of Romania.
