David Peters Leads Remaining 27 Into Day 2
Today is Day 2 of the inaugural $500,000 Super High Roller Bowl, part of the 2015 Super High Roller Series.
The first day of play saw the field grow to 43 entries and generate a prize pool of $21.5 million — good for the 15th largest live poker tournament in terms of prize pool ever held. The first nine levels were played out, and through those nine the field was cut down to 27.
The man leading the way was David Peters, an elite tournament player with nearly $5.3 million in live earnings, plus over $4.6 million in online winnings. While this is the largest buy-in event Peters has ever played, he's built up an impressive résumé that's got him here. Now, as the man best positioned to charge forward to the $7.525 million top prize, he'll be looking to put all of his dedication and experience to work.
At the beginning of the year, Peters was the subject of one of Rich Ryan's 10 Poker Predictions for 2015. In his No. 3 prediction, Ryan wrote that Peters would cash for at least $1.5 million in 2015. As it stands right now, Peters has achieved $857,379 in live tournament earnings this year, so just reaching the top seven and the money will make Ryan's prediction come true. Of note, this year Peters earned the largest score of his career when he won the €10,300 High Roller at the European Poker Tour Malta stop for €597,000.
As much as the excitement for Day 2 is building by the moment, Day 1 should not be forgotten. The high-stakes poker action got underway around 3 p.m., and a handful of great players hit the rail. Some of those to bust out were Fabian Quoss, Tobias Reinkemeier, Dan Smith, Doug Polk, Isaac Haxton, Jason Mercier, Ole Schemion, and Antonio Esfandiari.
Phil Ivey was another one of those eliminations, and he fell at the hands of Scott Seiver. Seiver went on to bag up the second biggest stack at the end of the day, and he'll be looking to add to his nearly $2.7 million in live tournament earnings this year with a deep run in this event. Just to note a few, Seiver has scored results of $243,280, $398,340, $790,139, $570,284, and $288,723 in 2015, so a cash here would seem to fall right in line with what can be expected from him.
Behind Peters and Seiver on the leaderboard are Connor Drinan, Bill Klein, Andrew Robl, and Dong Kim as the only other players over a million in chips. There's also David "Doc" Sands, Dan Colman, Daniel Negreanu, Andrew Lichtenberger, Isaac Baron, Brian Rast, and Phil Galfond left in the mix.
Bringing up the rear with the short stack is Igor Kurganov. He bagged just 138,000 from his 500,000-chip starting stack, but will have more than 11 big blinds to start the day so he's not out of it just yet.
Day 2 action is set to kick off at 2 p.m. local time at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, with the plan to play 10 levels or down to a final table, whichever comes first.