PokerStars.it EPT Campione Day 2: Botond Leads By Almost 150,000 Chips
Day 2 of the PokerStars.it European Poker Tour Campione Main Event has come to a conclusion and it is Hungarian Balazs Botond who has ended the day with the most chips, 646,000 of them to be exact.
Botond started the day with 107,000 chips but despite this he was a relative unknown to the poker media. However, those same media people are now more than away of him and his ability to constantly accumulate chips. He flew under the radar for a large percentage of the day before we noticed a blue PokerStars hoodie-sporting man sat behind a huge pile of chips worth approximately 325,000 at a time when the player we believed to be chip leader was sat armed with 220,000 ceramic discs. From that point on we kept an eye on him in an attempt to see him running amazingly well, such is usually the case in these situations, but he wasn't running that well at all just playing superb poker — something those sat around him confirmed to us.
When play resumes at 14:00 CET on Thursday Botond will be on course for what will be his third cash in an EPT Main Event. The man from Budapest cashed in the 2010 Vienna main event and more recently at EPT Deauville in 2012 and is now just 11 eliminations away from the money here in Campione. If we liked to gamble then we would put out houses on him picking up money finish number three.
Hot on the heels of Botond is one of a handful of former EPT champions still in the field; Ronnie Kaiser. The Swiss national was poised to strike all day long, hovering above the average chip count but he won a huge pot with 
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to eliminate two players at once and see his stack swell past the 500,000 chip barrier. He bagged and tagged 505,900 chips when play came to a close after six 75-minute levels.
Other notables still in contention in this tournament include former EPT London champion David Vamplew (412,900), Olivier Busquet (353,100), the charismatic Roberto Romanello (331,000), Team PokerStars Pros Liv Boeree (300,900) and Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier (113,500) along with Nicolas Chouity (257,000) and Martin Finger (137,600).
A special mention must go to Miss Boeree who was down to just eight big blinds when at the 500/1,000/100a level only for he to stage the most epic of comebacks to end the day with almost exactly 100 big blinds! it is too early to talk about the possibility of a first double EPT champion but one cannot help but think Boeree's comeback would make an excellent story!
On Thursday afternoon the 99 surviving players will retake their seats each with a common goal --to avoid becoming the 89th place finisher and becoming the bubble boy or girl. The players will battle it out for as long as it takes to get down to just 24 players so join us on Thursday afternoon for all the action, as it happens, from the EPT Campione main event.