Latin American Poker Tour, Day 2: Eric Levesque Sits in Pole Position
The 2009 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Playa Conchal concluded its second day of action on Friday with Eric Levesque sitting in the pole position with 420,000 chips.
At the beginning of the day, 119 players returned to the felt after Day 1 and when play ended for the day, 30 remained.
After bagging up some of the top stacks in the room from Day 1, Steven Merrifield, Daniel "djaniel" Mar and Clay Maguire all did well to improve their positions moving into the third day of play. Maguire and Merrifield were seated next to one another for most of the day, but maneuvered around each other with caution, feasting on the smaller stacks at the table. Mar stayed aggressive from start to finish and kept himself out of big-risk territory whenever he could.
Levesque, Fred Dykes and Eduardo Hernandez also performed extremely well all day. Each was able to amass a large stack and find himself toward the top of the leaderboard at day's end. It was Levesque. however, who finished the day with the most chips — 420,000. His largest boost came at the end of play in a massive pot that gave him the chip lead. He moved all in preflop holding A♣ Q♠ and Garoar Hauksson made the call with J♦ J♥, putting himself at risk in a coin flip worth well over 200,000 chips. Hauksson stayed in the lead until the river, where the Q♥ fell to send him to the rail.
Play was fast and furious until the money approached, where it took well over an hour to finally break the bubble. All of the short stacks tried desperately to hang on with every last chip, often folding big hands just to try and eke out a way into the money. It wasn’t until Gustavo Justiniano and Brad Stebeleski were forced all in (Justiniano from his ante and Stebeleski from his small blind) that the bubble would burst. Stebeleski went on to lose the hand and become the token bubble boy.
Rob Woodcock came into the day as the chip leader just as he did at this event in 2008. A year ago, he was able to ride his Day 1 chip lead to a ninth-place finish. This year, Woodcock was eliminated early on after losing pot after pot to kick off the day. Some other notables eliminated from action were Alex "Assasinato" Fitzgerald, Derek Lerner and Shirley Rosario.
Team PokerStars Pro was heavily represented today as well. A large group of team members rejoined the action, but only Maria "Maridu" Mayrinck and Alexandre Gomes made it through to the money and on to Day 3. They finished with 97,900 and 87,100 chips respectively. Maridu was the only woman to cash and remains the only one left in the field. Humberto Brenes, Andre Akkari and Leo Fernandez were amongst those teammates that failed to cash.
With everyone in the money, play picked back up right away and shortly after the bubble burst, the day was finished. Multiple players were eliminated on the same hand to finish off the night, causing play to end with 30 players rather than the scheduled 32.
Play is scheduled to resume at 12:00 p.m. local time on Saturday. The remaining 30 players are all in the money and will be playing down until only one final table of eight remains.
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