When the doors to registration finally closed at 4pm today here at the Grand Casino, Golden Sands, a total of 203 players had taken their seats in the €1,500 Unibet Open Main Event Day 1B. This was a slight increase on yesterday’s runners, bringing the total number of entrants up to an impressive 394, and the prizepool a cool €591,000.
There were a number of recognisable names in today’s field – EPT Champ Pieter de Korver, Ylva Thorsrud, Mats Rahmn and Claus Nielsen were cheerfully playing continually through the early levels, and a surprising number of famous Belgians – Matthias and Christophe de Meulder, Miss Belgium Alizee Poulicek and film star Axel Daeseleire (who got off to a cracking start) graced the second flight, too.
It took a while today for big stacks to really get going, but once they did there was no stopping them. Taking their turn at the top during the later levels were several French players, including Alain Pasqualini, Nicolas Ragot and Samphane Phomveha, although Pasqualini had some run-ins with overpairs which saw him drop from the very top spot. Also steadily maintaining chunky stacks were Jerry Pussinen, Fotilas Aristotelis and Trifon Kaburov, but at the end of the day Peter Pedersen was the one to catch, and no one did, as he rocketed up to 99,600 at the end of the day.
Several players in today’s flight have been attending the Unibet Open tour’s events in recent times, among them Imre and Kairit Leibold of Estonia. While Imre has previous final table experience here at the UO, it was Kairit who made Day Two this time round, including spending a spell on the streamed Feature Table. She may be shortish stacked with around 18k, but this is No Limit Hold’em and tournaments have been won with the proverbial chip and chair.
A strange twist in the Day 1B counts means that apart from the leader and a couple of shorties, most of the field of 65 is kind of in the middle bracket with around average! So many with 30-40k will join the much more unevenly dispersed lot from Day 1A; full chip counts for the ends of days are posted on the live update page as soon as we receive them.
The combining of the field means that tomorrow will see all remaining players reconvene and redraw and recommence battle – down to the money and beyond. 45 of them will see a return on their investment, with the first payout being €2,216, all the way up to the giddy heights of the title, which brings with it €150,715 in prize money! Of course the final table will lie in wait on Day Three, but tomorrow promises to be action-tastic from the start. Join unibetopen.com for live coverage from 2pm local time.
