888Live London Poker Festival: Skipper Leads the Way on Day 1c
After 13 levels of Day 1 action, 249 entries on the day and 700 in total across the three Day 1 flights, Paul Skipper took the most chips from an action-packed Day 1c when he bagged up 438,500 at the end of play. He had some strong company in the chasing pack, with Reza Fazeli (400,000), Charles Akadiri (312,000) and Steve Watts (255,000) all totting up great numbers ahead of what will be a terrific final day's play on Day 2.
Just 43 players survived Day 1c, meaning 108 players in total made it through, and among the ones unlucky to miss the boat on Day 1c were 888Poker Pro Chris Moorman, Paul Romain and Sin Menis Melin.
Others were more fortunate and were able to evade elimination. Skipper (photo) looked comfortable throughout, and he wasn't the only one. Andy Wool made a standard raise pre-flop with anything but a standard hand in K♥K♣ and got two callers to see a flop of K♦Q♦9♥ .After betting 12,000 into the 16,000 pot, Wool re-raised an opponent with K♠Q♠ all-in and scooped a huge pot, eventually ending up with 242,000 chips.
Reza Fazeli found the ideal moment to double up when he found pocket rockets and his aces held against Svetlin Ivano's eights. That put Fazeli up to 125,000 at the time, but he had almost trebled that by the time the last few hands were announced by the tournament director.
Fazeli knows how to play a big stack and will be a massive danger come tomorrow's final showdown, but no-one overtook the top three chip-stacks, which are Arron Fletcher (535,000), Graham Hawkes (515,000) and former Irish Open winner James Mitchell (512,000).
Play resumes at 1pm on Sunday, where someone will win the biggest chunk of a whopping £138,600 prize-pool. this is just the opening event of the 888Poker London Live Festival, and we expect huge numbers for the Main Event and High Roller tournaments next week. You can follow along with all the action via the 2016 888Live Poker Festival London live reporting.
