Rigged in Riga is over, a winner has been presented, a RedKings player made it to the money, Stephan Kjerstad got a punch, a Tennis Pro has tried the red shirt on, and here is full story about Team RedKings in Riga.

Stephan Kjerstad our only pro that was in the Main Event in Riga, went here mostly for some fun, as his main target is the little bit bigger tournaments in Europe. He was doing good until the middle of day 1, when he got all his chips in with _Jh _Jc vs _7c _7h pre-flop. Stephan has been on a bad run with these pots lately. When the flop showed _7s, and no Jacks came to help Stephan on the turn or the river he had to leave his seat.

Before this the qualifier Tapio Koivisto had already left the tournament so we had our two Finnish qualifiers to hope for, Tuomas Ketola and Riku Koivurinne.

Tuomas Ketola is a recognizable name in Finland, because of the following:
Tuomas Ketola (born February 21, 1975 in Turku) is a Finnish professional tennis player on the ATP Tour. He is the number two tennis player in Finland, right behind countryman Jarkko Nieminen and as of April 14th, 2006 is the 716th ranked player in the world. In 2004, he reached the first round of Wimbledon in singles by defeating three opponents in the qualifying matches. However, he lost his first round main draw match to Alex Calatrava.Taken from wikipedia.org.

Tuomas used every single serve, backhand and smash in the register, but it was just not enough to get to the money in this tournament.

Riku did better, just before the money he got all his chips in with _9s _9h, which is easy when the opponent has _As _Ac. Riku needed some help, and I guess you could say that God was just behind him when the flop came up _9c _9d _3s, giving Riku 4 of a kind and a nice stack to work with!

We got down to 10 players, and time for the final table bubble, there is no information on how the hand played out but it got a sad ending for Team RedKings, Riku got knocked out as the 10th best player in the tournament!

Very well played by all of the players, but in particular Riku Koivurinne who walks away with €1.900 in his pocket..

Congratulations to Riku and of course also to the winner Pim Van Wieringen!

One of our Finnish qualifiers has got a great start in Riga, on the board _3s _7c _9h _Ac _Kh, Riku got to showdown against a Swedish player. Riku showed _Ah _Kc and took his stack up to 25.000.

As a celebration, a big picture of Riku:

Not literally, but the name of the tournament is “Rigged in Riga” and just started over in the new casino Royal Casino, obviously in Riga. The buy-in to the tournament was $1100 and they have put the maximum of players to 170, and the rumors is that it is completely sold out.

4 of the tickets belongs to players in RedKings shirts, we have the Team RedKings pro Stephan Kjerstad and the the three Finnish online qualifiers Tuomas Ketola, Riku Koivurinne and Tapio Koivisto, a interesting mix.

All the players start with 15.000 chips, and we will try to update you here as much as possible!