By Lisa Yiasemides
Last night may only have seen three tournaments play out (a smaller daily schedule than usual for the WPT World Online Championships) but those three tournaments certainly set the scene ahead of tonight’s mammoth offering.
A total of 12 events will take place over on partypoker.com this evening. They include the conclusion of the Warm Up events, which play down to a winner from Day 2 today; Day 1b of the Micro Main Event Championship; three Big Game events, with buy-ins ranging from $55 to $5,200; and a $25,500 Super High Roller, to name just a few.
Concludes tonight
$215 Warm Up PKO ($200K GTD)
Aleksandr Nosov has taken the overall chip lead in Day 1b of the PKO Warm Up Main Event, after besting Torben Winther Sørensen’s stack of 2.1 million yesterday. Last night, Nosov outdid that by a significant margin, collecting 2,484,890 by the end of 18 20-minute levels and banking $462 in bounties.
Athanasios Tavlas (1,571,200 + $400) was the second-biggest chip leader but the Cypriot ended up 900,000 behind his competitor. The stacks were much closer together from this point, with Brady Spencer (1,492,908 + $200) and Nazar Buhaiov (1,388,360 + $350) sitting fourth and fifth places. Shaun Deeb (1,385,389), fresh off of his guest appearance on the Mix-Max Championship final a few days ago, took the last top-five spot.
Shaun Deeb
A total of 572 entries were recorded and online specialists Rui Bouquet (1,168,750 + $500), Maksym “Romeopro” Klopotok (982,530 + $375) and Fabio Sperling (977,883) were among the 77 survivors. Joining them for Day 2, which starts at 7 pm (BST) tonight, are Dan Shak (769,863 + $418), partypoker’s Josip Simunic (626,835 + $300) and Alexandre Reard (450,170 + $412).
Not everyone made it, naturally, and among the casualties was the latest inductee into the WPT Champions Club, Andrey Kotelnikov, Maria Ho, Niklas Åstedt and Florian Duta. Still, all is not lost as there is a Turbo last chance on the schedule today at 4 pm. With $184,600 already collected in the prize pool, there is a great chance that this event will smash the $200,000 guarantee.
$22 Mini Warm Up PKO ($50K GTD)
Once again, the Mini event was extremely popular. By the time late registration had closed, 1,496 entries had been counted, adding $29,920 to the prize pool and bringing the running total up to $53,180 – already significantly over the $50,000 guarantee with one flight to go.
There were plenty of big stacks by the time the clock was paused at the end of Level 18 and the biggest of them was Russia’s Egor Boriskin (2,479,840 + $68) who knocked out nine players over the course of the evening. Though it isn’t enough to go through overall chip leader at this point (that accolade is held by Jefferson Anacleto from Day 1a), he will go through with an extremely healthy stack with 177 big blinds to play with when Level 19 (7,000-14,000 1,750 ante) gets underway.
Gurjit Kooner (2,165,696 + $56) took runner up spot in the chip counts, while Serhii Biletskyi (2,160,174 + $55), Ludvig Bjerkfeldt (1,855,626 + $7) and Nichita Verbitchii (1,798,196 + $47) made up the rest of the top-five chip stacks. They will also return at 7 pm tonight to continue Day 2, along with the rest of the 236 players who advanced from this flight.
Continues tonight
Event: #07: $109 Micro Main Event Championship
Day 1a of the Micro Main Event Championship got off the mark last night too, with Sergei Ponkratyev setting the bar after he turned a 200,000-chip starting stack into a monstrous 5,494,967. It took almost 7 hours to do that, but it was a relatively closely fought battle at the top of the counts.
Duff Jeanfrancois (5,081,268) did second best and was the only other player to end up with more than 5 million in chips. Maksims Sapovalovs (4,805,102), Sihao Zhang (4,728,759) and Eddie Cronholm (3,902,936) all did extremely well too. They finished among the top five players, with 686 progressing from the 4,097 entries, and $409,700 collected for the pot already.
Still in with a shot are a host of big names that include Brock Wilson (2,788,521), partypoker’s Matt Staples (2,163,635), Jan-Eric Schwippert (1,488,260), Patrice Brandt (1,354,716) and online pro Lukas Soucek (979,266).
They have all made it through to Day 2 and today we will find out who joins them from Day 1b, which kicks off at 7 pm this evening.
Tonight’s schedule
Tonight is set to be huge! Aside from the Warm Up and Micro Main Event Championship events that continue this evening, Day 1a of the $1,050 Mini Main Event Championship also begins, with each of those tournaments starting at 7 pm.
Aside from that, there are a further 9 tournaments that range from a $22 buy-in all the way up to a $25,500 buy-in and with turbo, normal speed, progressive knockout and freezeout games all in the mix, there is a huge amount of choice for anyone logging onto partypoker today.