Givens Leads After Day 1B; Aido Among the Contenders
It was another long day of poker at the Playground Poker Club for Day 1b of the CA$10,000 Main Event in the 2019 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS North America. After a hard-fought 10 levels, just 107 players survived to move on to Day 2 tomorrow. The remaining 258 players will gather in the same for the first time when the action resumes.
Leading the way among those survivors is American poker pro Will Givens. He will head into Day 2 with 6,285,000 chips, far and away the chip leader from Day 1b. Things got started in the right direction for Givens when he made aces up against Elliot Smith just before the dinner break. Givens nearly doubled his stack and he kept the momentum rolling into the latter stages of the day.
With over $2 million in career tournament winnings, Givens will be looking to add another trophy to his collection along with a nice payday. Some other big names near the top of the leaderboard at the end of the day include Canadians Jonathan Dwek (4,330,000) and Michael Farrow (4,315,000) along with Spanish high-roller Sergio Aido (4,195,000).
Aido is recently coming off a Super High Roller win at EPT Monte Carlo and is showing no signs of slowing down. This is Aido's second bullet for the tournament but he got things started right today when he jumped out to an early chip lead. Forced to move tables a couple of times, Aido eventually found himself on the same table as other notable names such as Sam Greenwood, Orpen Kisacikoglu, and Paul Michaelis. One of the largest pots of the day came when Aido and Michaelis both flopped a pair of aces but Aido's king-kicker eliminated Michaelis who had a queen-kicker.
After a larger than expected field turned out for Day 1a, today was a bit slower since 151 players had already booked their spot in Day 2. When late registration closed after four levels, there were a total of 217 entries for the day. That brought the total number of entries to 521 for this event, surpassing the CA$5,000,000 guaranteed prizepool.
The day turned out much better than the previous one for the partypoker team members in the field. Ludovic Geilich (3,855,000), Anatoly Filatov (2,900,000), Bertrand Grospellier (2,655,000), Kristen Bicknell (1,865,000), and Mike Sexton (1,200,000) all made it through the day unscathed. Joni Jouhkimainen, Philipp Gruissem, and Jeff Gross were among those that were eliminated.
A few other players to keep an eye on include Antonio Esfandiari who quietly went about his business to bag an impressive 3,255,000 chips. Esfandiari hasn't played much poker since last year's World Series of Poker but is looking to get back into the swing of things before the summer series. Ari Engel (3,235,000) is always dangerous when playing in his home country and Kisacikoglu also bagged over three million chips with 3,125,000.
The action will resume on Thursday at 12 p.m. EST with the blinds resuming at 15,000/30,000 and a 30,000 big blind ante. Another ten 60-minute levels are on the schedule and the players are not expected to reach the money until early on Day 3. Continue to follow along with the PokerNews live reporting team for all of the action throughout the entire event.