The tournament room here at Playground Poker Club is all ready to host Day 2 of the PartyPoker WPT Montreal Main Event today, and some of the players have already started taking their seats, unbagging their chips, and getting mentally prepared for what promises to be a very tough but exciting day of tournament poker. Out of the 862 entries spread across three Day 1s, 177 of which were re-entries, we have 357 players who made it through to today’s Day 2.
This season of the WPT attracted a wide number of poker pros and icons to Montreal, and many of them are still in with a chance at winning the WPT Montreal title.
The field is led by local player Sebasatien Drolet-Poitras, who holds a towering stack of 270K, more than 40K ahead of the next player. Sebastien has had his fair of success on the local scene, and make a deep run earlier this year at the Full Tilt Poker Montreal Festival Main Event, finishing 18th out of 1,625 entries, but he is still looking for his first big title.
Second in chips is Sylvain Siebert, who finished 5th in last years WPT Montreal Main Event, which was good for $147,184. He holds a stack of 230K going into todays action.
Mohsim Charania, a live and online poker phenomenon, is coming into play today with a healthy 186K stack, placing him amongst the top ten chip leaders. He is coming off a recent title win at the WPT Rendez Vous à Paris Main Event this past October, where he bested a field of 187 to take home the WPT title and $449,856. This was his second major live title, as he is also an EPT Champion after having taken down the EPT Grand Final Monte Carlo Main Event in 2012, earning a payday of $1.78M. In addition to his over $3 million in live tournament winnings, Mohsim has also scored over $2 million in online cashes as the alias ‘chicagocards1’, with his biggest win coming placing first in a SCOOP event on Pokerstars for $380,364.
Also in the top ten chip stacks is Amirmasoud Babakhani, who was our WPT Montreal Spring Championship winner, where he took $442,248 for his win, and was also awarded a seat to the WPT World Championship, worth $25,000 + $500. He final tabled that tournament as well, placing 9th out of 146 for an additional $70,300 in winnings.
The long list of other notable players in today’s field include the likes of:
Byron Kaverman (156K in chips), Kevin MacPhee (134K), Greg Ostrander (134K), Micah Raskin (132K), Ludovic Lacay (129K), Vanessa Selbst (127K), Eugen Katchelov (119K), Matt Marafioti (119K), Griffin Benger (115K), Antonio Esfandiari (113K), Phil Laak (109K), Loni Harwood (83K), Xuan Liu (82K), Guillaume Darcourt (82K), Jonathan Little (74K), Ravi K Raghavan (67K), Scott Clements (67K), Mike McDonald (47K), Victor Ramdim (44K), Matthew Salsberg (43K), Jonathan Duhamel (40K), Sorel Mizzi (39K), Jeff Gross (37K), Tony Dunst (35K), Shawn Buchanan (34K), Scott Montgomery (22K), Scott Seiver (15K), just to name a few (ok… a lot)!
Some Canadian superstars and rising stars to look out for:
Yann Dion (173K in chips), Pascal Lefrancois(142K), Josue Sauvageau (128K), Guillaume Rivet (77K), Erik Cajelais (73K), Carter Swidler (62K), Jason Duval (56K), Jean-Philippe Piquette (56K) Isabelle Mercier (55K), Chanrancy Khun (49K), Jonathan Roy (43K), William Molson (40K), Marc-Etienne Mclaughlin (39K), Samuel Chartier (19K).
The Tournament director has just informed the players that we will be starting in just a few moments, so we’d like to wish everyone in today’s Day 2 the best of luck!
