By Lisa Yiasemides
Things are really starting to heat up in Knockout week. Last night, two more players took WPT titles in the 7-Max Knockout tournaments. Meanwhile, the three Warm Up events got off the mark, with Day 1a in the Main, Mini and Micro all taking place last night too.
With the Warm Up out of the starting blocks, that means just one thing: The Knockout Championship begins tonight! For the first time in WPT history, a Main Tour event will have a Progressive Knockout format, meaning that whoever goes on to win, will be the only player to have their name engraved on the Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup for taking down a PKO tournament!
With so much on offer, it promises to be yet another stellar weekend with WPT and partypoker but before we look ahead, here’s a recap of all of yesterday’s action.
$530 7-Max Knockout ($75K GTD)
At 7:30pm (BST) the two Knockout competitions got underway. Designed as one day events, it would be just six hours of total game time before we had a winner, and that person was Ramon Miquel Munoz. Playing from the UK, the Spaniard came out on top of a strong field with a particularly tough heads-up opponent, Roberto Romanello (poker’s most recent triple crown winner), the last player standing in his way of the title.
partypoker’s Roberto Romanello finished runner up
Interestingly, Roberto’s brother Nicholas also featured in the top five, along with Espen Uhlen Jørstad (who recently won the $5,200 Big Game) and Matthieu Chan Pang Cheong.
Sergei Denisov (6th, $2,443) was the player who ran the deepest without managing to pick up a bounty. Meanwhile, Vlad Stefan Lache (7th – $2,410 including $437 bounties) and partypoker’s own Dzmitry Urbanovich (8th – $2,152 including $593 bounties) took up the rest of the final table spots.
Dutch player Duco Ten Haven (17th) finished on the bubble, allowing Yuel Bereket to eke his way to a $1,001 min-cash (plus winning $250 worth of bounties). For Ten Haven, it was a case of saved by the bounties, with $406 in cash covering most of his buy-in.
The same could not be said for Jaime Staples (49th), Richard Dubini (53rd), Julien Perouse (54th), Steve O’Dwyer (56th) and Dominik Nitsche (57th) who were among the big names that left with nothing.
$109 Mini 7-Max Knockout ($50K GTD)
It may have had the smaller of the two buy-ins but 446 players (including re-entries) stepped up to play. Rasmus Agerskov Larsen rounded up seven and a half hours of play by defeating Simon Kaiser heads up. Both players won very similar amounts for first and second but Larsen’s $3,522 in bounties was what set them apart, with Kaiser banking $601 in comparison.
Rasmus Agerskov Larsen
Vojtěch Šusta, Hasse Mark Evans and Bram Joosten also fared extremely well, and Ivan Banić (6th – $1,721 including $778 bounties), Charlie Godwin (7th – $1,449 including $726) and Florian Flammersfeld (8th – $1,209 including $665 bounties) all reached the final table.
Continues Tonight
That wraps up last night’s winners, but who got off to a flying start in the Warm Up events?
$1,050 Knockout Warm Up ($500K GTD)
There were plenty of well-known names moving up and down the player list last night. With 102 entries putting $102,000 towards that half-a-million-dollar prize pool. Eighteen 20-minute levels were on the schedule and by the time the clock was paused, only 13 still had chips.
Nick Yunis chipped up the most, the Chilean pro continuing to make his mark this series after taking down the $1 million guaranteed Big Game at the end of last month for a $200,000 payday. He takes 2,270,741 (a huge return on the 100,000 starting stack) through. He also won almost three times his buy-in ($2,937) in bounties so far.
Nick Yunis
Jamie O’Connor was the closest to Yunis in chips at the end, but the Brit still had a 1 million deficit on him, with 1,232,439 bagged. O’Connor won $1,625 in bounties, almost as much as third-place finisher Roman Krajča, who accumulated $1,718 in bounties and 1,072,452 in chips.
Brunno Botteon De Albuquerque (1,002,881, $1,375 bounties) and Pavel Kovalenko (785,526, $1,531 bounties) also made the top five, leaving Roberto Romanello in 6th place at the end. The Welsh Wizard bagged 782,902 and won an even $1,000 in bounties.
Luke Martinelli (10th) was also among the survivors, as well as Jakob Miegel (13th), who’s progression to Day 2 came at the expense of Robin Andreas Berggren who fell just before time was called.
$109 Mini Knockout Warm Up ($150K GTD)
Tiago Guimaraes Dos Reis (1,231,926, $240) bagged biggest at the end of 18 15-minute levels. Gianluca Petrone wasn’t far behind at all though, with 1,204,721 collected in chips, and $293 in bounty prizes.
Robbin Dijkstra (1,110,429) managed to make it all the way up into third place, without eliminating anyone. There is plenty of time for that when he returns to play Day 2 though, as blinds resume at 7,000-14,000 (1,750 ante), giving him almost 80 big blinds to play with.
Gabriel Zitelli Dantas (1,069,099, $112) and Alex Whitenstall (1,061,094, $190) took the last two top-five spots, while Fabio Sperling was just one of the other notables who will also be returning tomorrow, Sunday, August 16 at 7pm. He brings through 970,764, good for 17th place out of the 91 who survived.
$11 Micro Knockout Warm Up ($30K GTD)
A whopping 1,513 entries were counted in the Micro event. That means $15,130, which is a little over half the guarantee, has already been collected.
Bonnie-Marie Knox (3,385,474) had the most productive night, chips-wise. She eliminated 7 players for $28 in bounties, slightly outdone by Aleksandr Pliushch who finished up in second. The Belarussian built his stack up to 3,319,575 but knocked out one more opponent, securing $33 in bounties by the end of 18 15-minute levels.
Tonight’s schedule
This is your first chance to become the first WPT Progressive Knockout Champion! The action starts at 7pm and this is one you really don’t want to miss!
