Bartlomiej Paradowski Takes Chip Lead; Daniel Szymanski Chipped Up

By Lisa Yiasemides

It was action from the word go here at Casino Spielbank Berlin, where 218 became 24 after 10 action-filled hours of poker. Through the ups and the downs, Bartlomiej Paradowski (pictured above) managed to bag biggest and is the player to catch with 2,110,000 chips.

Daniel Szymanski (2,090,000) is in the best position to challenge (pictured below), finishing just 20,000 chips behind. Sinan Turhan (1,400,000) took third, Christian Teubner (1,370,000) fourth and Zahi Ben Gigi (1,225,000) completes the top five. Michal Mrakes is also still in contention, and though one of the shorter stacks with 485,000, is still very much a player to keep an eye on.

It was a relatively late break for Paradowski, who didn’t build a top-placing stack until after the last break. He had made a couple of bluffs in the lead up to his big hand clash with Tim Kohlmann, when he doubled to around 1.5 million with pocket-aces to pocket nines. Paradowski didn’t look back from there, adding another 600,000 chips to his total before the day’s end.

Earlier in the day, Eirimas Livonas was the unfortunate bubble boy after he three-bet all in for 10 big blinds with pocket-jacks and ran into the dominating pocket-queens of Eldad Bentov. There was no reprieve on the runout for Livonas, which meant he exited in 80th place, outside of the €2,050, mincash.

He was in good company at the rail with players including Grzegorz Wyraz (€2,050), Gaelle Baumann (€2,050), Tomasz Gluzko (€2,050) and Firoz Mangroe (€2,190) all departing shortly after the bubble burst.

Defending Champion Thomas Hofmann (€2,960) fared a little better (pictured above) but will not make it back-to-back wins after being eliminated in a flip.

Still it was better news than for some of the notables, many of whom failed to reach the money. Emil Bise was first to exit, busting within the first two minutes of play. Marcin Chmielewski, Georgios Vrakas, Paul van Oort, Frederik Jensen, Johannes Toebbe, Rasmus Larsen, WPTDS Champions Felix Schulze and Sandro Pitzanti, and Champions Club member Van Nguyen all left empty handed.

Until tomorrow, when players return to play out the last 17 minutes of Level 22. From there, they will play to a winner with €130,000 up top for the winner.

Join WPT.com at 2 pm tomorrow, January 13 for coverage of all the excitement right through until a winner is crowned.

Check out all the WPTDeepStacks photos right here at Flickr.

WPT UK photos courtesy of Tomas Stacha.