Desnos Dominates Day 1a; Madanzhiev Among the Big Stacks
The crown jewel of the 2021 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS North Cyprus festival at the five-star Merit Crystal Cove Hotel Casino & Spa in Girne, North Cyprus is off to an excellent start.
Thanks to 281 total entries, the flagship $5,300 Main Event is nearly halfway to meeting the $3 million guarantee and may already surpass it with the second scheduled flight. After nine levels of 60 minutes each, 128 players bagged and tagged their chips for the night to get two days off.
French online casino games streamer Killian Desnos soared to a massive stack of 796,500 and put quite a distance to the nearest followers already. Seemingly involved in almost every pot, he ran up a massive pile of chips that has been unheard of on Day 1 of a major live poker event in the Merit Poker room.
Another three players increased their 100,000 starting stack more than five-fold and among them is also the 2020 WSOP Online international leg Main Event champion Stoyan Madanzhiev, who sits in third place.
Other notables in the overnight top ten include Mihai Niste, Sergio Fernandez Bernal, Dan Semenescu and [Removed:452].
Top 10 Chip Counts after Day 1a
| Position | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds Day 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Killian Desnos | France | 796,500 | 266 |
| 2 | Tamer Abdelzaher | Egypt | 542,000 | 181 |
| 3 | Stoyan Madanzhiev | Bulgaria | 535,500 | 179 |
| 4 | Mihai Niste | Romania | 505,000 | 168 |
| 5 | Philippe Jibeili Acosta | Lebanon | 479,000 | 160 |
| 6 | Sergio Fernandez Bernal | Spain | 478,500 | 160 |
| 7 | Andrii Andrieiev | Ukraine | 460,500 | 154 |
| 8 | Algirdas Saveikis | Lithuania | 447,500 | 149 |
| 9 | Dan Semenescu | Romania | 445,000 | 148 |
| 10 | [Removed:452] | Montenegro | 436,500 | 146 |
Two partypoker representatives entered the fray on the first of four starting days. John Duthie was caught bluffing into a full house to bust while Jeff Gross made it through with a stack of 113,500. Many other big names such as Aleksandr Merzhvinskiy, Sergio Aido, Walid Bou Habib, Alessio Isaia, Robert Heidorn, James Akenhead, and Mustafa Biz all fell on the wayside. They have another three chances on Day 1 and three levels on Day 2 to take another shot at the competition.
Desnos was spotted with a huge stack in level six as he knocked out Zorlu Er with flopped trips eights versus aces up. From there on, the Frenchman was involved in most of the action on his tables and finished a memorable day with nearly eight times the starting stack, which represents almost four times the average.
Stoyan Madanzhiev shared his table for a brief period and rose to a big stack himself when his dominating pair prevailed in a clash with Andrei Berinov. Both then parted ways when the table broke and added to their piles of chips. In the final three levels of the night, Desnos remained undisputed at the top of the leaderboard despite several smaller and medium-sized setbacks.
Day 1b is scheduled to take place on Thursday, September 23 and will feature nine levels of 60 minutes each. The following day, two flights with reduced level durations of 45 minutes and 25 minutes each await. All survivors then combine to one field with three further levels of late registration and re-entries available on Day 2.
The PokerNews live reporting team will provide exclusive updates from the event until a champion has been crowned. As of Day 2, the action will also be streamed on the partypoker Twitch and YouTube channels as well.