It was another exciting day at the tables of the Casino Barcelona yesterday, in fact the tables were packed right from the start and the cash game action was thrilling to leave no open space for the €220 Bounty Side Event! When the first card of the €720+80 Main Event Day 1b was dealt, more entries than the first starting day were shown on the screens. After nine 60-minute levels, 293 entries for Day 1b boosted the overall field to 418 entries and that number may still increase since all players that busted have the option to re-enter before the first card is dealt on Day 2 as of 16:00 local time.
Sviatoslav Shturyn had set a huge goal with his 551,000 chips on Day 1a but Joao Santos managed to accumulate even more chips than that. Coming to the feature table as big stack early on, the Portuguese continued to rise and dominated the action towards the end of the day. After building a very loose table image and showing a bluff against James Laina, the latter called off an isolation shove in a three-way pot with a straight draw and lost to the flush of Santos to see the latter catapulted into the top spot.
Other big stacks and notables of the 162 Day 1b survivors include Adan Soler Fernandez (484,000), who flopped a straight and flush draw to bust Poker Royale veteran Werner Eder, Royal Poker Club Cluj live satellite winner Stefan Fabian (451,700), Alain Roy (431,400), Josep Maria Galindo Lopez (344,200), Jens Kerper (340,700), Isabel Baltazar (323,000) and Pawel Brzeski (300,800).
Tillmann Raschke lost a big pot for heaps and tried to bust his short stack in the very last hand but chopped thanks to a straight on the board. Andrej Bogdanov shot two bullets and didn’t bag up any chips while MPS Vienna 2015 champion Andelo Bozic entertained his table as usual and could not talk out an opponent of folding two pair to join the rail. Other notables eliminated on Day 1b include Nicolas le Floch as well as MPS serial qualifiers Klaus Aichhe, Andre Hausmann, Kai Uwe Haferkamp and Friedrich Pfalzer.
The action of the Main Event will resume at 16:00 local time with level 10 and blinds at 1,200-2,400 with a running ante of 300. Re-entries before the start will receive the usual 80,000 chips and a total of 10 one-hour levels are tentatively scheduled to get close to the money. Furthermore, there is also a €300+30 Freezeout Side Event as of 20:00 with 30,000 in chips and levels of 30 minutes. Late registration is available until the start of level five and this tournament will finish off on Saturday.
