The PokerStars Championship kicked off in Barcelona, Spain on Wednesday with the €10,300 buy-in NLHE tournament. Soon poker’s importance faded in the Catalan city, however, since its citizens were hit by another vehicular terrorist attack, something that had happened multiple times in Europe recently. No poker player have been reported dead or injured so far, fortunately.
The €10K High Roller kicked off the Barcelona PS event with a star-studded line-up: the original 143-player field is down to 13, which include the most recent Aria Super High Roller winner Christoph Vogelsang, WSOP tag team bracelet winner Liv Boeree and 2014 WSOP Main Event champion Martin Jacobson. Meanwhile the €4,000,000 guaranteed prize pool National Championship is also underway, the play just finished on Day 1B.
All this seems secondary though, since on Thursday a terrorist drove his van into the crowd in Barcelona, leaving 13 people dead. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. This kind of terror carried out using simple vehicles like vans and trucks have happened a lot in Europe recently, in Nice in the summer of 2016, in Sweden in April 2017 and a few months later on the London Bridge. ISIS have been publicly encouraging its followers to carry out jihad that way on their online propaganda magazine Dabiq.
Josh Palmer, American poker pro from Daphne, AL who traveled to Barcelona to compete in the PSC was eating lunch with his wife near the scene when the terrible incident occurred. His wife spoke with wral.com about what they witnessed.
"All of a sudden we saw a bunch of people running down the road," Julie Palmer said. "Stores were closing. People were closing down their garage doors. It was kind of like a lockdown. It kind of calmed down for a couple seconds, and then there would come another wave of people from Las Ramblas.
We actually got off a tourist bus right at where the van ended up and walked a different way today. A couple hours earlier we could have been right there. There was just a scatter effect because no one knew what had happened. With so many people, there was just confusion."
Luckily Palmer and his wife, as well as all the players in the PokerStars Championship are okay. The tournaments are set to go on as planned.
