After 10 full one-hour levels of play, Day 1a of Playground Poker Fall Classic’s WPT Montreal has just completed. Players are now done bagging their chips, and some of them will take a well-earned 2-day rest, while others will dabble on the cash side, waiting for this Event to move on to Day 2. Eric Afriat has emerged the chip leader, after a long and steady climb, having led the pack for the better part of the second half. In the remaining field can also be found Jeff Gross, Daniel Le, Samuel Chartier, and Mike Sexton himself, the face and voice of the WPT. Some less known but talented locals are François Gobeil, Danny Boyaci, Andrew Boujaoude and Dean Murphy.

You can also qualify by playing one of the remaining Day 1s, which will feature more poker stars. Day 1b will be held on Saturday at 11am, and 1c on Sunday, also at 11am. All qualifiers will merge on Monday at 12pm. Players can play as many Day 1s as they like, whether they bagged chips on previous flights or not.

Full counts will be disclosed on this page later today, but here is a look at the upper board:

Here is a glimpse of some of the action, late in Day 1a. When we got to table 65, the board showed , Gennadiy Kostrov had placed a pot-size bet of about 15K, Jonathan Abdellatif had gons all-in for 22,900, and Allan Kessler was in the tank. He thought for quite a while, and then elected to fold. Gennadiy called, and opened . Jonathan tabled the leading , and Allan started gesticulating, letting people know that he had the winner, but couldn’t commit to a 3-way pot with it. Sometimes, there is a fine line between calling and folding, but a lot of chips could be hanging out on that line. Tough spot for Kessler, while Jonathan doubles up.

On table 61, we have seen Steven Joudry at risk a few time in the last 2 levels, but his all-in was never called. This time, Danny Boyaci was waiting for him with . Joudry had put himself all-in on top of Boyaci’s preflop raise with , and looked resigned as he observed the board. Danny chips up to about 130K.

The field having dropped below 63 players, our chip leader’s table broke, and chance sent him on a table that was already pretty stacked, in both talent and chips. Eric Afriat, now over 200K, has been moved to table 70. On his left is the well known Jeff Gross, a WPT Montreal regular, and very talented world-class player, who managed to bring his stack to over 150K. On that table is also sitting Richard Edwin Mask, 2nd in chips at the last break, now hatching about 150K. The last 100K+ stack on that table belongs to Poorya Nazari.

There is a possibility there for some major sparks during the last level of the day, and we will be watching.

Here are some more photos of Main Event players in action:

Players have now come back from their last break of the day. We gathered the highest chip counts during that break, and it seems like the rich got richer. Indeed, our top 2 players from one hour ago are still up there, although they switched positions. Eric Afriat is now leading Day 1a, with 186,400. When he has chips, he is know to be a force to reckon with, so we will keep a close eye on him throughout the rest of this Event.

Here are the 6 stacks that have cracked the 100K mark, along with some of their photos below: