Garcia Lorca Takes the Overal Chip Lead Into Day 2; 152 Players Remain
Today 331 entries took their seats at the tables here in cloudy Marrakech. Day 1b attracted many hopefuls trying to make it to Day 2 tomorrow here in the beautiful surroundings of Casino de Marrakech in the Es Saadi Resort. 104 of those entries managed to find a bag to put their chips in to reopen them again tomorrow. Taking the honors topping the chip count leaderboard for Day 1b and into Day 2 is Garcia Lorca (nickname) from Spain with a colossal amount of 315,600 chips.
Trailing behind Lorca is Harald Sammer, the German living in Austria. He bagged a staggering amount of 296,500 chips. He amassed a lot of those chips with big hands like full houses, quads and more of those kinds of hands according to himself. He also eliminated Gaelle Baumann when her king-queen ran into his ace-king. He also eliminated Romain Lewis shortly after that.
Third in the chip count leaderboard for today was Ben Bensimhon, he will take 260,000 in chips with him to his new table tomorrow. A substantial amount of those chips were collected when he hit higher flushes than his opponents, twice. In fourth place, we can find Thierry Delpui who eliminated another player in a huge pot just before the dinner break. He managed to end up with 238,400 chips. Closing out the top 5 for today is Alexandre Reard with 202,200 chips.
Bracelet winner Barny Boatman unfortunately fell at several hurdles again today, the same was the case for Rakesh Lalwani, Cheng-Wei Yin, Fabian Gumz, Sonny Franco, and Jerome Sgorrano.
Here in this Moroccan casino, it is custom that many poker players go solely by their nicknames. So expect them to crop up in the live reporting over the next few days.
All remaining players will return on tomorrow (Saturday) for Day 2 of the Main Event which will start again at 1 pm local time. The 152 remaining players will return to Level 13 which has a small blind of 1,000, big blind of 2,000 and a running ante of 300. The duration of the levels will increase to 60 minutes each. The schedule is set for 10 levels of play tomorrow with 4 breaks, including one 60-minute dinner break.
Come back again tomorrow to see who will make it into the money and stay in the running for that coveted WSOP Circuit Ring. PokerNews will be here to provide you with all the updates!