PokerStars EPT London Day 2: Vamplew Leads a Star-Struck Field into the Money
With 380 players remaining at the start of the PokerStars.com EPT London Day 2, it was expected to take a while to whittle down our field to 128 but after just under six 75-minute levels, the last of our 252 moneyless casualties was dismissed from the tournament proceedings. Eoin O'Dea, the former WPT runner-up and son of the famous Donnacha, was the man who had to take that most unwanted of crowns, the bubble boy.
The chipleader at the end of the day was David Vamplew who won a million chip pot on the cusp of the bubble after eliminating Paul Kristofferson holding 9x 9x on a 9x 2x 2x board against the Swede's Ax 2x. This put the young Scot at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the day with 1,130,700.
He, along with the other 127 players remaining are now all guaranteed £7,500 tomorrow but each one will have his or her eye on the gigantic £900,000 1st place prize, the biggest yet for season 7 of the EPT.
Despite the huge number of exits, the field will remain stacked going into day 3. The legendary Phil Ivey has about 289,000 and creeps into the top 25 while Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu has a lot of work to do with 66,000 and will be coming back with just 13 big blinds tomorrow. The dangerous and Skype Emo emoticon lookalike Benny Spindler sits in 4th place with 621,700 and Team PokerStars Pro Alex Kravchenko is in 6th place with 527,400. Former EPT winners Kevin Stani, Arnaud Mattern and Jake Cody all also safely made it into the money.
The long casualty list was as impressive as the players who didn't bust, EPT Berlin winner Kevin MacPhee was eliminated just a few spots off the money, while other people who bid their farewells today included Allen Cunningham, Annette Obrestad, Jeff Lisandro, Barry Greenstein and the newest member of Team PokerStars Pro, Liv Boeree. She ran Ax Kx into Sam Trickett's Ax Ax and was unable to catch a miracle. Trickett himself though would also bust before the money came along.
On Saturday, the tournament will attempt to play down to the final 24 players which indicates it could be as long as 7 levels with a dinner break as well. The payouts though are fairly flat until the final table which may cause things to speed up, but it will all be very dependent on how the tournament goes.
Play will begin once more at 12pm local time, the PokerNews Live Reporting Team will be back on the scene for all your action needs. We'll see you there!
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