ACOP Day 3: Onward To the Money
We've reached "hump day" of the 2012 PokerStars.net APPT Macau: Asia Championship of Poker Main Event as today is Day 3 of the five-day event. Of the original 184 runners who entered the tournament, just 56 of them remain, and it's Andrew Gaw who tops them all with 329,200 in chips.
Gaw is trailed fairly closely by the first end-of-day chip leader of the event from Day 1, Yue Hin Lam. Lam bagged up 303,900 in chips last night. Behind him is Xing Zhou with 298,000 before the field sees a decent drop off to Tsugunari Toma and Edmund Lee with right around 215,000. That rounds out the top five, but there's plenty of other notables still in contention.
Team PokerStars Pro Raymond Wu sits just outside the top 10 with a stack of 144,900, Tom Marchese has 131,200 and Kenny Shih has 91,000. Wu isn't the only Team Pro still left in the field, either. He's joined by teammates Vivian Im, Celina Lin and Angel Guillen, although all three of them have less than 35,000 in chips. Guillen lost a pretty big pot right at the end of the night last night for most of his chips and will be returning today as the second shortest stack remaining. He has 10,700 in chips.
What's bad news for Guillen is that the blinds will be 600/1,200/100, giving him just about nine big blinds to start. But, the structure for this event is very slow and player friendly, so if Guillen can double early, he'll have a great shot and getting himself right back into the mix. For example, the structure includes two rarely-seen levels on the tournament circuit with the 700/1,400/200 and 900/1,800/200 levels.
While Guillen's hopes of a comeback create a good story for the day, it'd be a shame not to mention the 2010 champion of this event, Victorino Torres, who is still in the mix. Torres bagged 45,000 to end the day and will be looking to make another deep run here in one of the biggest and most prestigious events in Macau.
The action kicks off today at 3:10 p.m. local time, and that's when PokerNews will have the updates flowing. The goal will be to play down to the money, or until the end of the 16th level, whichever comes first. The top 22 spots will be paid out, and the tournament staff predicts that the money will be reached first.
Be sure to stay tuned right here for all of the action coming to you shortly!