Well play has finished for the day and the chips are in the midst of being tagged and bagged as I type.
The official player count has yet to come in but the tourney screen is showing that 86 players look to have made the final cut, though that may drop slightly once the dust has settled.
The official Day 1C chip leader is UK player Tom Hall who’s sitting pretty on 120,700, Blackbelt Poker’s Sida Yuen
Liv Boeree, image courtesy of Poker News
is sitting on around 72,600 after busting the lovely Liv Boeree, her Pocket Eights proving no match for Sida’s Pocket Queens when all the chips went in. Still a cash of HK$35,500 (£2,826) in the HK$5,000 7-handed event yesterday should take the edge off.
Vic regular James Mitchell also failed to make the cut unfortunately; he was last seen heading for the cash tables with a determined expression on his face. Tournament steamroller JC Tran was also one of the players who just couldn’t get anything going today and he is also out.
Josh ‘JJProdigy’ Field is sitting on a stack of 93,700 though is strangely registered as a UK player rather than a US one, though this may have something to do with the fact he is currently calling Blighty home at the moment.
Brothers Hachem made it through to Day 2 both on around 50,000 chips and Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier also made the cut finishing the day on 65,000 after his Pocket Kings held up against an opponent’s over-enthusiastic shove with a gutshot on a 2h 2d 3c board.
After eliminating David ‘Chino’ Rheem Theo Tran was one of the big stacks for most of the day before taking a hit 20-minutes before the end of play after running his Nine-high flush into the nuts leaving him with a stack of 62,600.
The current chip leader is Kristoffer Myhre from Norway who has 183,400. In second place is Peter Nielsen from Denmark with 141,500. In third place is PokerStars Online Qualifier Roel Pijpers from Netherlands with 125,500. They all played Day 1B.
The total prize pool is HKD $16,130,400 (£1.2 million) which makes it the biggest prize pool ever in Asia. Play resumes for Day Two tomorrow at 12:15pm (5:15am GMT) with 196 out of the 429 runners making it past the respective Day 1’s.
Bryan Huang, image courtesy of PokerStars blog
Work-wise I managed to squeeze in an interview with Asia Team PokerStars pro Bryan Huang who was in a remarkably upbeat mood despite being knocked out of the tournament after being horribly outdrawn by second pair, which effectively crippled him. His short-stacked shove with Pocket Sevens a few hands later lost out to Ace Queen to see him hit the rail. Bryan took down the APT Macau just a scant two-weeks ago and was voted ‘Rookie of the Year 2008’ by Bluff Australasia after cashing in three back-to-back APPT events last year.
Tune in tomorrow for more updates and action, it looks like my interview with Joe Hachem is scheduled for then as well so I’ll let you know how it goes.
Right, I’m off to hit the cash tables up and hopefully make me some money, laters people…
Razor Sharp Pro Poker 