Half-way through the 2nd level to be played today there are already 37 players who have hit the rail and been eliminated from the tournament. This has not been an exceptionally fast pace, but nevertheless that represents a lot of chips and consequently some big swings on the leaderboard.

There is a break after this level during which tournament staff will remove the black T100 chips from play – and while they’re working on that, we’ll put together an updated leaderboard.

The first and only clue that something big had happened was when we noticed Réjean Grenier was moving slowly out of the tournament area, walking down the central aisle of the Tournament Hall.

Réjean had started the day with 242K in chips, however, and had spent most of his Day 1 flight among the chip leaders in that starting day…

It turns out that Steve Savard also started the day with a healthy stack (215K) and when they tangled – it was for all of the chips. Unfortunately we missed the action, but whatever happened, Steve Savard is now playing more than 550K in chips and seems poised to make a deep run.

Only time will tell…

Robert Notkin – the champion of the Canada Cup Main Event held here at Playground Poker Club in 2014 – is out early in Day 2. He started the day with a very small stack (30,800) and within the first 15 minutes of play he had increased his holdings to 46,300 – which were broken down to be counted in the middle of the table when we arrived as Marcello Rosa was making his decision.

Not too much time passed and Marcello made the call and the hands were tabled:

Robert:
Marcello:

The flop was marginally in favour of Robert (but only by a hair): but the turn was fantastic – . The celebrations were short-lived, however – the river spelled the end of the tournament for Robert.

The players have taken their seats and cards are now in the air for Day 2 of the Main Event of the Montréal Poker Expo.

There are a lot of very strong and experienced players in the field, but two of the best are Mike Leah and Chanracy Khun – who happen to both have strong stacks and are seated at the same table.

A couple of other tables we’ll keep an eye on today are table 59, where, among others, Patrick Braga, Jean-Philippe Piquette, and Thomas Lefort are seated, and table 66 where we find Philippe Plouffe, TJ Ulmer, and Edward Hislop.

The players who qualified for Day 2 of the Montréal Poker Expo are filtering in to the Tournament Hall and taking their seats where they will find their sealed bags full (some more, some less) of the chips they accumulated during Day 1.

There are 171 players left in the event and the money bubble player will be the one eliminated in 73rd place – 72 places pay. So there should be a fairly decent amount of play before the bubble starts to really affect the play too much. That being said, we can also anticipate an early flurry of eliminations as short-stacked players try to establish themselves for the rest of the day.

Blind levels today will lengthen to 60 minutes and the tournament re-starts in level 14 (1.2K/2.4K/a400). Play is 9-handed and will continue for 8 levels today, at which time the remaining players will bag up their chips to return on Day 3.

Good luck to everyone still in the action!

Today was the third of three starting flights in the $1,000 + $100 NL Hold’em Main Event in the Montréal Poker Expo. Over the three starting flights there were a total of 647 entries and 171 players have qualified for Day 2. Note that this was a next-day re-entry event that mandated that if a player qualified twice for Day 2, only their best qualifying stack would remain in play. This was a moot point in this tournament, as no player qualified for Day 2 on multiple Day 1s.

The following table is the random seating draw for Day 2, which begins at 12pm on Monday August 31st at 12pm. Note that you can sort the table by clicking (or tapping) on a column header or search the list using the search box provided.