A number of players have now climbed into the 7 figures, with Day 2 of the WPT Canadian Spring Championship Main Event nearing its the final stages. With only two 45-minute levels left to play tonight, here are the players that currently lead the field:
Ryan Higgins just took a terrible beat to be eliminated. We arrived at the table with a flop that had been dealt 
and Ryan had led out a 45K bet. His opponent, Mario Lim, tank-jammed (he had Ryan covered) after several minutes, prompting a quizzical reaction from Ryan, who finally called. The last aggressor showed first – 
while Ryan was in good shape with 
.
However the turn brought out the 
prompting an exclamation from Ryan. The insignificant 
didn’t change anything in his favour and he was eliminated while Mario gloated about his suck out and predicted victory in the tournament.
A few players have now crept up over 1M in chips as level 21 winds down. The current millionaires are:
Ruben Perceval is trailing just behind at slightly over 900K, but it should be noted that he’s at a table with both Johnny and David, making for a very stacked table.
Ami Alibay has been among the chip leaders for the past few levels but he just lost a big pot to Pierre Guenette who is sitting directly to his right. The UTG player, Wei Xu, made the opening raise to 20K and George Daoukakis flat called from UTG +1. The action folded around to Pierre who also just called. Ami raised to 55K from the BB. Wei and George folded, Pierre called and 2 players went to the flop.
Flop: 
.
Pierre checked and Ami led out for 68K. Pierre thought for a bit and counted out raising chips – he made it 160K. Ami had a decision to make, but judging by the investigation of his neighbour’s remaining stack, it wasn’t between calling and folding but rather a decision between calling and re-raising to force Pierre to commit the 222K he had behind.
After a minute and a half Ami ended up calling and the turn came 
. Pierre immediately shoved and again Ami thought for a couple of minutes. He ended up folding, showing 
. Pierre tried to just show one partial card to his neighbour and not much was seen except that it was a spade.
Ami is still in pretty good shape after the hand with more than 800K in play.
Below are some photographs taken after the money bubble had burst.
Since the bubble burst the eliminations have come quickly and the tournament is now down to 100 players with over 4 levels left to play today.
Mike Leah was one of the more recent eliminations as flopping Kx Kx 7x doesn’t help K6 nearly as much as you would think when your opponent has 7x 7x for a flopped boat.
Play will continue today for 11 levels total, which is to say that it will conclude at the end of play in level 24.
The Main Event of the WPT Canadian Spring Championship is on break, and play will resume momentarily in level 20. Stacks are continuing to grow, and although no one has breached the 1 million chip mark yet, we expect this to happen fairly soon. Here is an estimate of the top 5 stacks at the break:
The bubble is always a big turning point in a tournament, and players often have quite a bi-polar method of playing at this stage. One portion of the players will tighten their game up to try and make it into the money, while another takes advantage of these ‘scared’ players and use this opportunity to chip their stacks up by bullying their table. This results in a growing gap between the leaders and the short stacks, as many players see their stacks dwindle down to just a few big blinds leading up to the money. It also means that when the bubble finally bursts, the field is full of players ready to get their chips in with any two marginal cards, leading to a spree of eliminations.
Here at Playground Poker, the dealer no longer announces ‘Seat Open’ when someone has been eliminated, as this has been replaced by a light system. LED lights have been attached to the back of the dealer chairs, and when a player is eliminated, the floor is called over via a green indicator light (the red is for emergency, and the yellow is to call over the cocktail waitress). Now that the bubble has burst, we’ve been seeing green lights go off at all corners of the room, as the field has dropped by 11 players in the 15 minutes between the money bubble and the current break.
Another player has been eliminated on the same hand that player number 128 busted. Play paused on each table as the hand was completed as tables waited to kick off hand-for-hand play, but on the last table still going, Stephanie Goertz was eliminated putting the rest of the players in the money. For the record, the other player eliminated on the hand was Leng Khauv.
Since this hand 6 players have already been eliminated and gone to the tournament desk to receive their payment coupon.
Martin Roy, the Tournament Director at Playground, has just announced that dealers should light their red lamps at the end of this hand as play will begin hand-for-hand with 127 players remaining.
