it was warm even in November and you couldn't take photos in the casino. That was about it.

In truth, we don't know that much more about the place as the sun sets on our first day in the neighbourhood. It's definitely warm, the Algarve is certainly a beautiful place, and they're sticklers about that photo law. But we can also now add this: it's a terrific spot for a poker tournament. The first day of the first ever EPT event in Vilamoura has just wrapped, and it was as good as any we've encountered on the tour.

The three men who enjoyed it most were probably the Team PokerStars Pro from Holland, Ruben Visser, the PokerStars qualifier from Lithuania, Dominykas Karmazinas and the Austrian Ljubomir Josipovic. There are several ways to build a stack, and each of them found their own path to success.

Visser and Karmazinas were on the radar for most of the day, always sitting with piles of chips, but deep in the final level they each won monstrous pots to take them into six figures. Visser busted Guillaume De La Gorce - a boat of sixes full of nines against a jack-high flush - while Karmazinas flopped a king-high flush to oust Tyler Bonkowski's aces. Their respective opponents were each chipped up too, but only wound up contributing the lions' shares of Visser's overnight 172,400 and Karmazinas' 183,000.

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