The threatened rain here in Golden Sands, Bulgaria, did no more than that, and it was a beautiful day to stay indoors and play tournament poker for all 197 players who had bought, qualified, last-minute-satellited, or borrowed the buy-in to get into the €1,500 Main Event. 10,000 chips and hour levels meant a good amount of play, at least to begin the day, but that didn’t stop the attrition rate being pretty high. Finnish TV presenter Jussi Heikela was the first elimination (understandable with Aces against Queens on a Queen-high flop) and over 100 others were to join him on the rail over the course of the ten levels of play.
Several recognisable faces were spotted at the tables at the start, but not at the end, like Budapest Unibet Open winner Anthon-Pieter Wink (who was, however, seen in the €300 Pot Limit Omaha during the last few levels – 10/10 for total poker immersion today), Michal Wisniewski, Kristijonas Andrulis, Alex Martin, and Jens Kyllonen to name just a few.
The flurry of eliminations which brought the field to under 80 around level Eight may have been in part inspired by the neighbouring Welcome Drinks – it’s hard to ignore the faint but insistent beat coming from the bar, and perhaps the double-up-or-go-home/out attitude hit the short stacks around 10pm… A couple of players at this hour had everything to play for, though, building the sort of stacks that could challenge the lead when the final hand was dealt, which is of course an encouraging way to start on Saturday when the field brings together both Day One survivors.
Among those who spent time in the upper chip echelons: Sebastian Mortelmans, who took an early lead and kept a decent stack until dropping right at the end, Luis Petersen and Boudewijn Wubbels (pictured), who built solid if not towering stacks and held on to them during the middle stages, and late-emerging chip monsters Simeon Naydenov and Daniel Pena, who cracked the 60k mark before anyone else.
However, leading the pack at the end of the day were Jussi Nevanlinna (over 89,000) and Yulian Kolev (also over 80k) along with Thomas Svendgaard who had an excellent last couple of levels, plus Simeon Naydenov. Notably stacked over 50k is the implacably consistent Joachim Buch, who, not content with back to back 3rd place in Unibet Open events, ground a small stack for a long time before plumping it out at the end. Full chip counts coming soon.
The second batch of players ready to take on Day 1B of Unibet Open will be starting up at 2pm local time tomorrow, and we’ll be watching and bringing live updates, streaming from the Feature Table (from 4pm) and video, photos – the big picture.
