Photographs taken during levels 15-16:

Antonio Esfandiari is running hot. Just ask Jeosafat Alejandro Cruz.

Cruz was recently eliminated from the Main Event by Esfandiari, after the magician found a way to improve his flopped top pair to overtake Cruz’s flopped set. Esfandiari held , up against Cruz’s , on a flop of . The turn brought the , and the followed right after, giving Esfandiari the bigger boat and sending the Cruz to the rail. Esfandiari has only added to his huge stack since the last break and will likely emerge as one of the chip leaders when the day is done.

Yves Loiselle is back in business in the late stages of Day 2B.

Loiselle and James Gilbert got all their chips in the middle on a flop, as the timer ticked down on level 15. Loiselle was playing a relatively short stack, which Gilbert easily covered, but regardless of how many chips Loiselle had, Gilbert was never backing down from this one. Hands were tabled to reveal that Loiselle had flopped two pair with , but Gilbert had a lot of outs to beat any hand you can imagine thanks to his straight-flush draw. The turn brought the , and the river was the , giving Loiselle a full house. In Loiselle’s own words “I’m back, baby!”

Since late registration period was closed, the number of remaining players has been decreasing at quite a fast pace. We are down to 179 players left and it keeps going down. With a level and a half left today, smaller stacks are trying to build up. Ambrose Ng’s attempt to double up failed when Saya Ono called his all-in, about 1.7M, before the flop. They both had pocket pairs and none of them hit the board, so Ono’s higher pair allowed her to collect all of Ng’s chips.

Ono:

Ng:

Board:

When action folded around to Dean Murphy in the cutoff, he raised the blinds up to 225,000. Dylan Wilkerson placed a 3-bet to 575,000 from the big blind, and the two tangoed to the flop.

Once the dealer rung out a flop, Dylan paused for a moment before checking over to his opponent. Dean, who was sitting on roughly 10 million in chips, glanced over at Dylan’s 1.8 million chip stack and then announced he was all-in. Dylan made the snap call, and hands were tabled.

Dean:
Dylan:

Dylan had a lock on the hand once the turn brought the , and the river was dealt as a formality. With that pot, he climbed up to around 4.8 million, a few blinds shy of the average stack.

The players in Day 2B of the MILLIONS North America Main Event are enjoying a 30-minute dinner break, and when they return to the felts they will have 2 more levels to complete before sending their chips onto Day 3.

Daniel Strelitz had taken over the top spot on the leaderboard, running up his million starting units up to 18,675,000. Below are the top 10 counts in play entering level 15: