All of the poker media attention on the 9th of July in Las Vegas was pretty much all concentrated on the two day 2s happening in the Rio Casino. The two separate flights were both being run to allow the much bigger Day 2c to have enough room on Wednesday.
The Open Face Chinese game that prevented Gus Hansen and Tom “durrrr” Dwan from playing their stacks in the WSOP Main Event appears to have continued on into yesterday, and the amounts of money being reported as changing hands are fairly impressive.
Main Event
Day 2A and Day 2B were always going to be smaller than Day 2C, given the tendency of Poker players to try and play the last available day of entry for any major event. The two fields were kept separate, so as not to disadvantage the players in Day 2c, and we saw the continuing story of two former winners of the Event making a run towards the prize again.
Doyle Brunson started of the WSOP season by declaring to all and sundry that he wasn’t going to be playing any Tournament, including WSOP events, as he couldn’t handle the long days at the tables at his age.
He went against his own decision in the $50,000 Players Championship, chasing after the Chip Reece trophy in an event that probably gave the 79 year old Texan the best chance to add to his 10 WSOP Bracelets with the shorter days, and longer levels. Doyle wasn’t able to make it all the way, but he did make it all the way to the penultimate day. It may have been this success that inspired him to take another crack at the Main Event.
Last year’s winner Greg Merson was the other former champion to survive the day and still be in the hunt for a second WSOP Main Event Title. Since winning the Main Event, the 25 year old has signed with Ivey Poker, but apart from that has pretty much been off the radar.
Doyle started the day with 81,025 chips in his stack, and was able to turn that into a 224,000 stack by the end of the day. I imagine the Texas Dolly will be taking Wednesday slowly, trying to save his energy for Day 3 on Thursday. His twitter seemed to indicate the day had taken a lot out of him.
45 minutes to go for day two. I feel like a truck ran over me but my stack is growing, 240k
— Doyle Brunson (@TexDolly) July 10, 2013
Merson on the other hand started with a small chip advantage, his stack standing 81,650 chips tall. He turned that into a skyscraper of 275,600 chips, which seems to have put him in the top 20 in chips, so is certainly a good basis to go for a repeat of last year’s result.
Other former world champions were not so fortunate to survive the day, as both Chris Moneymaker and Joe Cada failed to survive their second day of action. Joining them on the rail were Johnny Lodden, Eugene Katchalov, Matt Salsberg and last year’s final table bubbler, Gaelle Baumann.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom in the Amazon Room, as other players were in the process of accumulating all the chips brought about by the bustouts. Olivier Busquet (100,600), Anton Wigg (101,600), Elizabeth Hille (114,300), Max Lykov (120,000), Eoghan O’Dea (130,000), Sorrel Mizzi (143,900), Scoot Seiver (148,000), Liv Boeree (158,800), Melanie Weisner (173,200), Annette Obrestad (196,600), and Rupert Elder (342,500) are the names that jump out at me from just the first page of chip updates, so there are certainly still a lot of well known players in the field.
Day 2C is on the cards for Wednesday, and a large portion of the well known names will be in that field. We’ll have to keep opur eyes pretty well peeled to keep up with them all, but we’ll do our best.
We’ll be continuing to bring you the updates from the Amazon Room of the Rio Casino in our daily update, as well as letting you know anything that happens out of the ordinary as the Main Event progresses.
Keep your eyes on our twitter account to stay up to date.