Justin Miller has eliminated Eleuterio De Miranda Guedes, taking his last 52K in chips and growing his own stack to over 250K in the process. The chips went in preflop after Eleuterio shoved over Justin’s early position raise. Justin tanked for a few seconds and confirmed the amount before calling and turning over .

After he’d been called Eleuterio just said, “good call” and turned over . The community cards didn’t offer any assistance – .

Justin is now among the chip leaders of Day 1b going into the final 2 levels.

For the past few levels we’ve seen a few players build up some dominating stacks, but nothing like Joseph Verdugo has done since the last break. In just a level and a half he has gone from an already-leading 185K all the way to 325K as he looks to set himself up smartly for Day 2. There’s still long way to go today, however…

The players are on their third break of the day and we took the opportunity to count the large stacks in the tournament as well as note the chip counts for some of the other notable players in the field.

Chip leaders

• Joseph Verdugo – 185K
• David Szymanowicz – 177K
• Harley Stoffmaker – 172K
• Josh Kimmel, Michael Neuber, Michael Mallette, Ami Alibay – 130K

Some other notable players…

Gavin Smith and Antonio Esfandiari both busted during the last level or two, but there are still some other notable players in the field.

• Kara Scott – 65K
• Marc-Etienne McLaughlin – 13K
• Philippe Plouffe – 62K
• Mike Leah – 61K
• Laurence Grondin – 32K
• Jeff Gross – 40K

When we got to the table Gavin Smith showed off his small stack with the disclaimer that he had just run Kings into Aces… and then he got his last few thousand into the middle and was called by Dean Murphy, who showed . Gavin was holding .

The board ran out which didn’t give him the lift he needed and Gavin is out of Day 1b.

Late registration for Day 1b has closed and the final number of entries for today is 308, which is up a significant amount from the 219 total entries yesterday for Day 1b. That adds up to 527 total entries which means that there’s a chance that the event will have an overlay to the prize pool!

Of course this is great for players – an overlay amounts to free money, and definitely adds value to the tournament as a whole.

Needless to say, we’ll be keeping a close eye on registration numbers tomorrow!

We’re half-way through level 2 in today’s flight of the $1000 + $100 WPT Canadian Spring Championship and new players keep joining the tournament at a steady pace. This flight is already up to 263 entries with another 2+ hours to register.

Among the players at the tables today are such notables as Gavin Smith, Marc-Etienne McLaughlin, Mike Sexton, Mike Leah, and yesterday’s Bad Beat Jackpot winner Richard Figiel.

It’s a snowy (!) Friday morning in the Montreal area, but the snow hasn’t hindered players from getting to Playground Poker Club to take their seats for Day 1b of the WPT Canadian Spring Championships. So far 200 players have been seated with late registrations coming all the time, so this Friday flight is definitely going to be busier than yesterday’s Day 1a.

Good luck to all of the players today!