By Lisa Yiasemides
What a difference a day makes! Last night it was announced that the first Online Series will now continue until the end of the month. The response from players during the last ten days has been incredible, with huge numbers attracted since it began a week ago.
However, a suggestion was made by the community that running the Main Event and the WPTDeepStacks events separately would enable players to focus on both in equal measure. Always keen to listen to player feedback, WPT and partypoker have amended the schedule in order to enhance player experience.
With that in mind, the $1,050 WPTDeepStacks will now take place later in the month, with Day 1a opening the event on Monday, May 18 and concluding the following week, on May 27. The WPTDS guarantee has been increased from $2 million to a whopping $3 million too! As if we didn’t spoil you enough, a $109 Mini WPTDS has been added, with a cool $1 million guarantee of its own! The new schedule can be found in the partypoker lobby.
The other piece of exciting news is that today is the first day of the Main Event. That’s right, Day 1a kicks off the Online Championship at 6 pm* and with a whole host of satellites and feeders running too, you can qualify for as little as $3.30!
Turbo – $530
Back to last night’s events and first up is the Turbo. A total of $127,000 was accumulated for the prizepool via the 254 entries.
Luke Martinelli outlasted them all after seeing off his final opponent, Freek Scholten, heads up. Hungarian player Norbert Szecsi took third place as Jimi Koponen and Ognyan Dimov completed the top five.
Norbert Szecsi
Anthony Spinella (6th), Roger Tondeur (7th) and Thomas Boivin (8th) also made the final table, with Yuri Dzivielevski (12th), James Romero (13th), Christopher Oliver (15th) and Dimitar Danchev (17th) also going far.
Mini Turbo – $55
A huge 1,175 buy-ins were counted in the Mini event, creating a prizepool of $58,750. It took almost five-and-a-half hours to play to a winner and that person was Mohamed Bachir Andolssi, after beating runner-up Andrea Panarese. The two players did a deal when heads up was reached with Andolssi and Panarese chopping the money, playing out for just $20 more (plus the trophy and bragging rights, of course).
Ladies event – $530
The two-day event concluded last night, as the six finalists returned to battle it out for a proportion of the $50,000 prizepool. Laura Burland exited first, returning with only a few big blinds at the start of Day 2. She took $2,750 for 6th and was joined at the rail by Lauriê Tournier and Catarina Ferreira in 5th and 4th places respectively.
Daria Krashennikova, the Day 1 chip leader, was next to fall confirming the heads-up line up between Rebecca Lynne Pack and Kelly Ann Saxby. The two women did a deal at this point before playing to a winner and it was Pack who took down the biggest prize, with Saxby taking a very respectable runner up place and also taking a five-figure sum for her efforts.
Kelly Saxby
Mini Ladies – $55
There were 14 players in contention when the second day of the Mini Ladies event got underway. Christina Barrett was the runaway chip leader at the start of the day, and she managed to convert that into a third-place finish, with only runner-up Carli Chait and winner Carmen Raiche-Marsden getting further. Meanwhile, Laura Burland cashed in both ladies’ events, getting as far as 11th place in the Mini, to add to the 6th place result in the Main.
Continues tonight
The Weekender – $1,050
The second of three starting flights began at 6 pm and $326,000 was collected through 326 entries. Once again, the tournament attracted some serious poker talent with the top twenty chip stacks bursting with well-known players.
Julien Perouse (673,128) was in the top spot at the end of 18 levels and Alexandru Papazian (447,724), Niklas Åstedt (423,245), Chad Eveslage (416,219), Conor Beresford (369,435), Javier Zarco (310,074), Joni Jouhkimainen (273,767) and David Peters (267,362) all managed to chip their way into the top 20.
Julien Perouse
At the moment Jordan Drummond (717,350) is the overall chip leader, with Perouse in second, Pedro Correa (654,877) in third, Manig Loeser (575,260) in fourth and Christopher Andler (535,130) in fifth place.
The Mini Weekender – $109
Almost 1,500 registrations were logged in the Mini adding another $144,700 to the prizepool. Guntis Aleskins (964,788) accumulated over 100k more than Matthew Wilkins who bagged 853,685 for second, as Pavel Veksler (735,737), Simone Natale (722,106) and Goran Mandic (633,544) completed the top five stacks.
Both events have already smashed their $500,000 and $200,000 guarantees, and with the last flight still to come, the prizemoney will only go up! Both Day 1c events begin at 3:30 pm today and feature reduced 10-minute blinds.. Day 2 gets going at 7 pm, and we will play all the way to a winner.
PLO – $3,200
Eight of the 128 starters remain, with Joao Vieira (833,351) starting in pole position when play resumes in this event at 7 pm. Espen Myrmo (753,194) and Jacob Carl Schindler (732,834) also have stacks, whilst Ola Amundsgaard, who won the $5,200 PLO event earlier this week, takes 555,455 through and will certainly be one to watch.
Richard Ashby (322,561), Ferenc Deak (279,711), Mads Amot (189,791) and Ihar Pliashko (172,793) have more work to do but are still in the running to win the $96,732 top prize.
Team partypoker Sam Trickett (9th) and Ludovic Geilich (17th) also reached the money stages with 18 places paid.
Mini PLO – $320
The $320 Mini PLO garnered plenty of attention too and $112,800 in prizemoney was collected through 376 players. There are 12 still in with a shot of the $22,561 first-place prize but Brett Davies comes back in front with 1,783,684, a whisker ahead of Rui Ferreira (1,690,924) who has accomplished yet another deep run this series.
Calvin Anderson starts in third with 1,193,613 and Akseli Paalanen (1,009,128) is the only other player to come back with a seven-figure stack.
WPT500 & WPT Super 50 continue
Júlio Fantin bagged biggest in Day 1g of the WPT500, taking 440,869 through to Day 2 tomorrow. Alex Fortin-Demers (408,580) was Fantin’s closest rival and takes second place, with Kevin Macphee (330,633), Alexandr Trofimov (281,301) and Team partypoker Jamie Staples (270,972) rounding out the top five stacks. Anton Morgenstern also had a productive start, accumulating 213,659 by the end of Level 18.
More than 1000 players entered the WPT Super 50 – the $55 tournament that has a $1 million guarantee. David Fernando Tavares Fialho (559,565) and Myroslav Kushnir (525,808) took the top two spots in the counts, with Marius Gendvilas the only other player to finish with over half a million chips, bagging 521,520 at the end of the night.
Coming up tonight
As mentioned earlier, the second flagship event gets out of the starting blocks today, with Day 1a of the Main Event finally upon us! The $3,200 buy-in event is undoubtedly the jewel in the crown for this series with an enormous $5 million guaranteed! Satellites and feeders to the four-day event are running now, and all the way through until Monday, May 18, when Day 2 takes place.
There is also a $1,050 Mix-Max Bounty and a $109 Mix-Max Bounty starting tonight at 9 pm. It promises to be another jam-packed night and we look forward to seeing you at the tables.
Leaderboard
Please note this takes into account results up to and including May 8
Rui Ferreira’s serial final table cashes, have pushed him into the top spot on the Leaderboard and a clear 44 points ahead of Paul Höfer in second. Leo Fernandez holds in third place, whilst Charlie Carrel and Sam Greenwood bump up into fourth and fifth places respectively.
*All times referred to are BST.