PokerStars Caribbean Adventure High Roller: Minieri and Veldhuis Head Pack
The first day of play for the $25,000 High Roller Event at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure is in the books. The starting day was jam packed with some of the biggest names in poker, all of whom ponied up plenty of cash to try and dethrone Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier to take down this year's title.
Over 80 players entered the battlefield and at day's end, just over 50 of them remain. Team PokerStars Pro Lex Veldhuis leads the way while fellow team member Dario Minieri is hot on his heels. The two both finished with over 200,000 chips, separated by just a few thousand chips.
From the day he burst onto the poker scene, Minieri garnered a reputation for being an extremely aggressive player. Throughout the seven levels of play on Day 1, he stayed on the gas and ran over the competition at his table. He was involved in numerous pots, sending a handful of players to the rail. Veldhuis stayed aggressive as well, but most of his chips came thanks to Justin Bonomo.
Veldhuis flopped trip sevens against Bonomo's flush draw. Veldhuis put his aggressive image to work this time, raising Bonomo's flop bet and getting the shorter-stacked Bonomo to call off all of his chips needing to hit a diamond. After the turn and river card were blanks, Veldhuis shot up toward the top of the leaderboard where he stayed all day.
Joe Cada also had a very good day on the felt. The reigning World Series of Poker champion ended the day with 164,400 chips. Sitting next to Cada all day, Isaac Baron had an excellent day of his own. Baron finished up with 124,700 chips.
Some of the Team PokerStars Pros still remaining are Sandra Naujoks, Greg Raymer and Peter Eastgate. Daniel Negreanu and Chad Brown sit in the middle of the pack while defending champion Grospellier is at the bottom of the barrel. Grospellier bagged up 7,200 chips and still keeps his chances for a repeat alive.
A few of the notable bustouts were John Duthie, Alexandre Gomes and Jason Mercier. Mercier put all of his chips at risk with K♦ J♦ against Andrew Lichtenberger's king-queen offsuit and failed to get there. Another big name to exit early on was Lee Markholt. Markholt battled with Mike Matusow in an aces-versus-kings showdown. Markholt held the rockets but saw them get shot down when a king spiked on the river to give Matusow a full house.
The players left in the field will be returning at 12:00 p.m. local time Tuesday to continue with Day 2 and we expect you to do the same by keeping your browser pointed to PokerNews.com for all the live coverage.
