By Lisa Yiasemides
Day 1a of the Main Event was a nothing short of star-studded as players flocked to play the $3 million guaranteed event last night. It’s the fourth Championship tournament of the series so far, and the second Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup event so it was no surprise to see huge names in the world of poker doing their best to find a bag ahead of Day 2.
Not only that, but Day 1b of the Warm Up events also took place ahead of Day 2 this evening. There is still one more turbo starting flight on the schedule for those of you who don’t want to miss out on piece of the $500,000 prize pool. More details of that can be found a little later.
Event 04: $3,200 6-Max Championship ($3M GTD)
A total of 434 players wanted to get involved in the Main Event action as quickly as possible, jumping straight into the first flight on offer and generating a huge $1,302,000 towards the prize pool.
There were eighteen levels on the clock and at 25 minutes long, it took eight and a half hours to qualify for the next stage. Nikolay Baryshnikov was first out of the door and the Russian opted not to re-enter. Perhaps we will see him back tonight. The same too for Manig Loeser (428th), Chance Kornuth (392nd) and Jaime Staples (371st) who were among the early eliminations that didn’t fire a second bullet, well not yet anyway.
Luke Reeves (386th), Parker Talbot (334th), Sergio Aido (156th), Dan Smith (148th) and Team partypoker Josip Simunic (75th) all had two stabs but couldn’t survive until the end, the latter coming particularly close with 73 players making it through. Alexandru Papazian (74th) followed him to the rail and was the last player to leave before the clock was paused.
With Day 1a wrapped up, it was Christos Xanthopoulos (1,695,885) who bagged biggest. The Greek finished ahead of Nicholas Marchington (1,534,487) in second and poker heavyweight Steve O’Dwyer (1,293,077) in third. Pim Gieles (1,280,824) and Jiachen Gong (1,280,284) rounded out the top five, finishing on almost identical stacks.
Steve O’Dwyer
A total of 12 players managed to reach the ‘milly club’ and Elio Fox (9th, 1,083,507) and Dara O’Kearney (11th, 1,012,156) were among them. Pascal Hartmann (18th, 896,257), Dimitar Danchev (23rd, 673,675), Sergi Reixach (28th, 603,472), Patrick Leonard (29th, 599,584), Daniel Dvoress (465,430), Alex Foxen (44th, 423,958), Kahle Burns (54th, 350,278) and partypoker Ambassador Jason Koon (317,409) were just a handful of the other well-known players to progress.
Event 04: $320 Mini 6-Max Championship ($1M GTD)
The Mini event is neither Mini in buy-in or prize pool but is named only for the fact that it is Mini in comparison to its Main Event big brother.
Brazilians took the top two spots, with Thiago Azevedo Grigoletti (2,166,431) and Leocir José Carneiro (2,042,722) incidentally also the only two players to build stacks of more than 2 million. Barbra Davison (1,949,865), Curtis Petrigrew (1,871,589) and Jan Strazisar (1,862,387) also had very productive nights, doing enough to secure themselves a spot in the top five.
The extremely attractive $1 million prize pool was always going to entice some high-quality talent and of the 1,152 entries it is hard to select a few names among the 160 survivors, when there are so many to choose from. Just a handful of the notables to make it through are Scott Margereson (9th, 1,616,048), Dimitar Danchev (25th, 1,210,630), Chris Moorman (38th, 1,019,850) and Jason Wheeler (52nd, 815,782).
Jens Lakemeier (160th, 66,758) scrapped through but has less than the 100,000 starting stack when play resumes tomorrow, leaving him with plenty of work to do. Still, at least he still has a chip and a chair, which is more than can be said for Sylvain Loosli (170th), Renato Nomura (254th) and Thomas Boivin (277th), who all busted before the end.
Event 04: $33 Micro 6-Max Championship ($300K GTD)
Once again it was Brazil that finished at the top, with country representative Alex Gelinski De Carvalho building a bigger stack than anyone else in the 3,608 field. He goes through with a monstrous 3,770,774 chips, a long way ahead of his opponents.
Elwira Elzbieta Gredzinska (2,533,356), Niclas Hansen (2,327,228), Emmy Karlström (2,280,028) and Dimitrios Michailidis (2,272,854) all had fantastic runs too and made it into the top five as a result. As with the other Championship events, the payouts haven’t been determined yet but once Day 1b this evening and Day 1c tomorrow have concluded that information will be made available.
$1,050 Warm Up ($500K GTD)
Day 1b in the Warm Up proved to be more popular than the first starting flight. Day 1b saw 213 registrations, compared with 123 in Day 1a. That means $336,000 has been collected for the prize pool and the potential of added value still a possibility with one starting flight left to play at 4pm (BST).
No one was able to recreate the crushing performance displayed by Samuel Bernabeu Guilabert in Day 1a. His 3 million chips are miles ahead of anyone else. Still, Connor Drinan (1,795,895) did do enough to overtake Alex Foxen (1,696,821) for overall second in chips, after finishing top of the counts yesterday.
Connor Drinan
Hot on his heels were WPTDeepStacks Champion Firoz “Mohamed” Mangroe (1,611,743), Patrick Serda (1,456,180), Christian Rudolph (1,303,654) and Timur Khamidullin (1,281,838), illustrating just how tough the field was.
Yuri Dzivielevski (9th, 821,995), Govert Metaal (10th, 778,168), Niall Farrell (11th, 765,558), Lars Kamphues (12th, 755,857), and Sylvain Loosli (19th, 617,085) start in a strong position too, with blind levels at 7,000-14,000 (1,750 ante) when Day 2 resumes tonight at 6pm.
For Nikita “Mikita” Badziakouski, it was a case of so close yet so far. The Belarussian departed in 30th place with only one other player, Tom Talboom (29th), busting before the whistle blew.
$109 Mini Warm Up ($150K GTD)
A total of 569 registrations were logged in the Mini event, adding $56,900 to the prize pool and bringing the running total to $99,900 when added to the Day 1 entries.
Liliane Figueiredo (1,653,489) was another Brazilian to fare well, climbing to the top of the chip counts by the end. Once again it was a Brazil versus Brazil battle for the top spot, with Fernando Olímpio coming in close second, bagging 1,649,203.
Jonathan Gagnon-Villeneuve (1,493,660), Diego Ventura (1,493,242) and Rick Hutting (1,453,943) rounded out the top five of the 94 players that all have a seat for the next stage of the competition.
Fabio Sperling (9th, 1,230,224) and Steven Van Zadelhoff (11th, 1,176,340) also built up to over a million in chips and the big names didn’t end there, with Jans Arends (17th, 981,768), Jens Lakemeier (24th, 852,000), Michel Dattani (43rd, 610,633), Manig Loeser (58th, 440,448) and Niko Koop (67th, 349,321) also still in the mix.
For those who didn’t make it, there is one last opportunity to try and win a share of the $150,000 prize pool and that, as with the Main, starts at 4pm today. Antonio Pedro (1,778,416) is still the player to catch, currently the overall chip leader following his Day 1a performance.
$11 Micro Warm Up ($30K GTD)
Mats Bruland (2,330,088) did just enough to beat yesterday’s chip leader Maya Mistry (2,316,175) and has set the bar ahead of Day 1c.
Stas Ronenko (2,019,020) also finished over 2 million, with Josiah Edward Weaver (1,871,647) and Mattias Persson (1,819,293) coming close too. Lawend Mardini Himmo (1,686,758) took the last of the top five places in the chip counts.
Barbra Davison (5,208) barely did enough to creep into Day 2 and will start with only 5% of the 100,000 starting stack. Her stack will be worth less than 1 big blind when play resumes at Level 19, with blinds costing 7,000/14,000 (1,750 ante).
Tonight’s schedule
There is a ton of poker on the schedule for players with all buy-in requests accounted for. As well as Day 1c in the Warm Up events and Day 1b in the Championship events, there are a whole host of other options lined up for you on this Super Sunday….
There is the first $25,500 Super High Roller ($750K GTD) of the series, a $10,300 High Roller ($300K GTD), $5,200 Big Game ($1M GTD), with $530 Mini ($300K GTD) and $55 Micro ($100K GTD) editions running alongside it. Last, but not least are a $2,100 6-Max KO (200K GTD), $215 Mini ($100K GTD) and $22 Micro ($30K GTD)!