Full house at the Montreal Casino for Vincent Lecavalier’s tournament

Reported by Simon Gravel
September 4th, 2009

Montreal, Quebec

Vincent Lecavalier’s Texas Hold’Em poker tournament held at the Montreal Casino on September 1st was quite a success and raised $100 000 for charity. Numerous personalities showed up, such as Roberto Luongo, Patrice Brisebois, Guy Carbonneau, Vincent Damphousse and Stéphane Quintal to support the event. Profits will go to underprivileged kids from Quebec. The Tampa Bay Lightning captain has been honored by the National Hockey League for his contribution to a children’s hospital in Florida.

The 200 seats available for the Vinny Lecavalier Classic sold out, as expected, bringing the prize pool to $60 000. The first prize of over $15 000 went to Éric Bergevin. The chief organizer of the LTPQ, Pierre Martel, finished 6th.
Odette Tremblay finished 8th, she is the wife of World Series of Poker bracelet winner André Boyer. The 10th place went to Pierre-Yves Méthot, president of Prestige Télécom, which has Guy Laliberté and René Angélil among its shareholders. The stock car driver Isabelle Tremblay finished 17th. (see below for the complete list of winners)

Celebrities present had their good moments. Vincent Lecavalier, quite satisfied with the succcess his event was having, qualified his own playing style as semi-tight, although he had to rebuy chips – all the money from the rebuys went to charity. Roberto Luongo is an experienced player who finished second behind Scott Hartnell this summer at the World Series when the NHL held a poker tournament. At some point, Luongo doubled up with a well disguised straight. After a quick rebuy, Patrice Brisebois, who hasn’t been playing much Hold’em lately, built a pretty big stack. Guy Carbonneau had the misfortune of being seated on the right of André Boyer, and played pretty tightly throughout. He seems to have been card dead for most of the tourny.

Vincent Damphousse lost most of his stack when his pocket aces were busted by a straight on the turn. He had to rebuy. Stéphane Quintal didn’t play at all. He said he just came to support his friend and doesn’t even know the rules of Hold’Em.

Strangely, not one player of the Montreal Canadiens showed up, altough many of them do play poker, such as Guillaume Latendresse, Maxim Lapierre, Georges Laraque and even the new star Mike Cammalleri. Habs’ jerseys were worn by many participants who had a chance to try to intimidate Lecavalier, beat Luongo or display a better strategy than Carbonneau.

At the end of the rebuy period, it turned out that $83 000 had been raised for the Vinny Lecavalier Foundation. Montreal businessman Herbert Black took out $17 000 from his pocket to even up the number to 100 000$. Last year, Mr Black payed $100 000 in another charity to buy Guy Carbonneau’s lucky tie.

It was the second major tournament held with dealers in the poker room of the Montreal Casino. Players are now asking for a major tournament in Montreal.

Winners of the tournament:
1- Éric Bergevin
2- Vartan Balassanian
3- Lino Di Pasquo
4- Tommy Petropoulos
5- Shayne Khanna
6- Pierre Martel
7- Stéphane Faucher
8- Odette Tremblay
9- Rick Khanna
10- Pierre-Yves Méthot
11- Yannick Lefebvre
12- Ronny Messina
13- Mitch Schnurbachi
14- Gilles Leblanc
15- Peter Zhou
16- Guiseppe Frascione
17- Isabelle Tremblay
18- Thien-Huong-Dang Nguyen
19- Brian Azimov
20- Gregory Flessas
21- Kevin Boucher
22- Joseph Kazzi
23- Philip Tse
24- Steven Smith
25- John Helou