Racener Bags Second-Biggest Stack in Continued POY Hunt

They played until nearly sunrise, and by the time Day 1b of The Colossus €550 No-Limit Hold'em at World Series of Poker Europe ended at nearly 5 a.m. local time at King's Casino, just 12 players remained out of 210 entries.

Ozan Guruz leads the way after turning his 10,000 starting stack into 365,500, but the name that will catch everyone's eye on the leaderboard is second-place John Racener, who bagged 334,000 for a wide lead over third-place Karel Kratochvil (214,000).

Racener, who collected his first bracelet in this summer's WSOP, finds himself in the thick of the WSOP Player of the Year race and now has put himself in prime position to rake in a pile of points. He trails only Chris Ferguson and Ryan Hughes, both of whom are busily grinding here — and both of whom busted in this flight — in the standings.

Racener built a big stack in the latter stages of the 18-level grind, and he won a late race with an ace on the river when his ace-king got there against the pocket sevens of Gisle Olsen. Racener also eliminated Rex Clinkscales with just a few tables remaining, ace-nine over ace-six.

Alex Foxen (189,000), Viliyan Petleshkov (165,500) and Ryan Leng (141,000) also made it through.

Meanwhile here's a look at those who made it into the 32 paid places but went bust in advance of bagging time:

Place	Player	Prize
13	Sasa Stancic	€1,182
14	Gisle Olsen	€1,182
15	Vlado Sevo	€1,182
16	Erel Ozgar	€1,007
17	Roberto Romanello	€1,007
18	Roland Israelashvili	€1,007
19	Erol Gunenc	€884
20	Damiano Nigro	€884
21	Sven Lorenz	€884
22	Petr Gaydos	€884
23	Eilert Eilertsen	€884
24	Rex Clinkscales	€884
25	Albert Santander	€884
26	Aleksandr Pantiukhin	€884
27	Lee Richard	€884
28	Jan Mach	€800
29	Kristen Bicknell	€800
30	Tomas Soderstrom	€800
31	Vladimir Troyanovskiy	€800
32	Michal Drha	€800