Tam Nguyen Leads 196 Players on The Closer Final Day; Deeb, Cada & Hellmuth Still in Contention
Welcome to Day 2 of Event:84: $1,500 The Closer No-Limit Hold’em. This tournament had a $1,000,000 guaranteed prize pool, but the total of 2,800 entries over three starting flights pushed that number to a huge $3,206,944. 196 of those players have moved on to Day 2 and Tam Nguyen leads the way with an impressive 1,284,000 in chips. Close on his heels are WSOP bracelet winner Roman Korenev (1,198,000) and 2018 Player of the Year Shaun Deeb (1,172,000) followed by Denis Gnidash (1,058,000) and Griffin Abel (1,000,000) who round out the top five.
Joe Cada will also take his seat on Day 2 to defend his title but, with a chipstack of just 202,000, he’s got his work cut out for him. Other bracelet winners that are also returning include Ari Engel (936,000), Mike Leah (519,000), Kristen Bicknell (319,000), Benjamin Moon (172,000) and Phil Hellmuth, who will be looking to spin up his stack of 142,000, which is less than 10 big blinds.
When play resumes it will be at level 21 with a small blind of 8,000, a big blind of 16,000 and an ante of 16,000. The levels are still 30 minutes in length and there will be a 15-minute break after every four levels of play. The dinner break is scheduled prior to the start of the final table and directly after that, those nine remaining players will come back and play down to a winner.
PokerNews has activated the MyStack App for this event, allowing you to directly adjust your chip counts in our live reporting blog using your iPhone or Android phone.
You can download the app for iPhone or Android now to get started. Then, create a newPokerNews account or update your current one to start updating your status immediately. Your followers can see all the live action that you're involved in.
Click here to download the My Stack app for iPhone, or click here to download the My Stack app for Android.
The quest for one of the last remaining 2019 WSOP gold bracelets begins on Monday, July 15th at noon local time. The final prize pool numbers have yet to be posted, so it's not clear at this time what the Day 2 min-cash will be or exactly how much money the winner will take home, but what is guaranteed is that all 196 players are chasing the WSOP gold bracelet and six-figure score.
The PokerNews team will be on the floor to cover all the action from when the first is dealt until the last card hits the felt and the newest WSOP champion is crowned.