Day 1A started today at 12 noon local time. Partypoker have 11 players registered for play today all eager to do their best in the second Asian Poker Tour Macau main event.
A total of 133 players sat down although some must have overslept and arrived in the tournament room up to 40 minutes late.
Todays plan is to play 10 levels today with a 60 minute dinner break after the 6th level. This means play should be all wrapped up soon after 1am
But before we can think about the end of the day and soft warm beds or hours of drinking excess, we have 10 hours of poker action to enjoy.
One player who only enjoyed about 1 hour’s worth of poker was Marc Gravel from Canada. Marc had his stack crippled when his straight ran into a higher straight. After a short while he had the misfortune to run his pocket kings into the pocket aces of an opponent. Marc’s wife came looking for him after another hour or so thinking he would still be in the tournament. We had to break the unfortunate news to her and she went off to find him.
Ian Frazer had a slow start to the afternoon and even when he had the good fortune to look down at pocket aces in the big blind and made a standard raise, no one wanted to play along.
Three Partypoker players started off on the same table with the brothers from Belarus, Maksim and Mikhail sitting across from Gylbert from Canada. I walked over and saw a strange hand involving Gilbert which he will probably want to forget.
On a checked board of 8¨ 7ª 4© A© 2¨ Two players checked it to Gylbert who tried to steal the pot with a $550 river bet. One player mucked and another player took a while before calling. Gylbert’s trick didn’t work and let out a big “woops” as he mucked his hand as his opponent showed an 8.
Soon after that the table broke as players were being eliminated all over the room and our 133 starters were now down to 103 players. We had also recently lost Georgetta from Italy and Ihar from Belarus so we were down to only 8 players remaining. Looking around the tables all our guys were doing reasonably well. Ian Frazer had managed to pick up a few nice pots and was in good shape at about 25,000 chips.
I followed Maksim over to his new table and saw that a short stacked player pushed all in for his last 6000 chips with a pair of 7’s. No one wanted take on the challenge and all folded round to Maksim who easily had the guy covered and was holding A 10 and decided to flip that coin. The flop brought J 10 Q rainbow pairing Maksim’s 10 and putting him ahead. An ace on the turn strengthened his hand still further but didn’t really change anything. His opponent was dead to a 7 which din’t come and Maksim duly picked up a very tidy pot.
At 17:00 The Poker Pack Head Hunter side event started with a HK $500 bounty on all players except the Poker Pack guys who all had a HK $2500 bounty and a cuddly donkey on their heads. I kept an eye on this event and saw David “Chino” Rheem go all in for his last few chips with A§ 4 § and get called by the man on his left who flipped over K© 9©. All it took was a 9 on the turn to eliminate Chino and pass his bounty & donkey over to the victor.
It’s 6.30 and dinner break time. We still have 7 PartyPoker players of the remaining 64 playing despite the late elimination of Zdenek from the Czech Republic. Players have an hour to each and relax before coming back and playing another 4 levels.
