After two tournament days and 19 levels of one hour each, the 411-entry strong field of the €1,000 + €100 Main Event of the 2015 Unibet Open has been whittled down to its last 16 hopefuls.
All of them have at least €4,220 locked up for their efforts and play will resume in half an hour from now on at 13:00 local time at the Casino Barriere in Cannes.
The blinds will resume in level 20 at 12,000-24,000 with a running ante of 3,000 and quite a few of the short stacks will be hoping for a pay jump that comes with the next elimination.
Among the half a dozen with less than 20 big blinds that try and spin up their stack are Day 1a chip leader Julien Sitbon (353,000) and Vyacheslav Igin (182,000). In the middle of the pack are David Hefner (940,000), Jussi Heikela (889,000) and Joachim Kleiven (634,000) while four participants bagged up more than one million in chips overnight.
Fred Weiss (2,113,000) and Karl Stark (1,617,000) are leading the field after both running very hot during the last two levels of last night on the feature table. They are followed by Florian Ferroni (1,081,000) and Loic Francois (1,046,000). The odds of a home victory on the French Riviera for the second time in its third edition are quite good, as half the remaining participants are indeed French. It is already confirmed that a new Unibet Open champion will be crowned, as all three remaining champions in Mateusz Moolhuizen, Quentin Lecomte and Peter Harkes were eliminated yesterday.
Follow the PokerNews live reporting to find out who takes home the stunning trophy and first place-payout of €80,000. There will also be a live stream of the final table and the text updates will take place according to the delayed stream from then on.
