Day 1 Concludes
Among those who've already come and gone are Chau Giang, Vitaly Lunkin, Peter Eastgate, Barry Greenstein, Johnny Chan, J.C. Tran, Lex Veldhuis, Andy Black, Daniel Negreanu, Chris Ferguson, and the list goes on and on. In fact, it's easier to talk about who's still left.
Chino Rheem was riding the short stack all day, and he'll have some work to do tomorrow. Also down there in the danger zone are Nam Le, J.C. Alvarado, and Mohsin Charania. Moving up a little bit we see Kathy Liebert, Juha Helppi, Matt Brady, Lee Markholt, Vanessa Rousso, and Bill Chen all in the middle of the pack. Even further up the board we have Bertrand Grospellier, defending champion Nenad Medic, Alex Jacob, David Steicke, Isaac Haxton, Erik Seidel, and David Pham.
And now we get to the top of the board. Young pro Darryll Fish was the first man to really take control of this tournament in the first few levels. He held pretty steady for most of the late night, bagging up a top ten stack. Masaaki Kagawa charged late in the day to move ahead of Fish, and Toto Leonidas is ahead of them both. The top spot is occupied by Dutchman Michiel Brummelhuis. Thanks to a few huge pots in the last two levels, Brummelhuis surged past the field, bagging up an impressive 330,200 chips.
Brummelhuis will be back to defend his monster stack tomorrow at 2:00pm. We'll be here too, and it'll be a long day of poker as we press toward the final table. See you tomorrow!