Players are into level 7 of the night, and roughly half the night has already gone by. The field has dropped down to 229 players, as many players have already been sent to the rail (or the Rail for a drink!). Fortunately for them, there are still two more starting flights for the opening event tomorrow!
Photographs from levels 5-6:
Guy Carbonneau
Registration is now closed, and a total of 340 players joined us for Day 1b of the Strike Out Cancer Charity Event, which is the opening event of the Montréal Poker Expo.
After 4 levels of play, a few players have taken a head start on the rest of the field. The current leader appears to be Aladin Reskallah, who has accumulated 85,500 chips so far. Below is an estimate on the current chip leaders.
| Name | Chip Count |
|---|---|
| Aladin Reskallah | 85,500 |
| Steven Leblanc | 85,000 |
| Sebastien Laviolette | 70,000 |
| Frederic Morin | 69,000 |
| Yves Durand | 61,500 |
| Maxime Filion | 58,000 |
| Khang Can | 57,500 |
| Odette Tremblay | 57,000 |
Photographs from levels 3-4:
The Tournament Hall at Playground Poker Club
Less than 30-minutes remain to the registration period, so it’s not too late to jump in to this second flight of the Strike Out Cancer Charity Event, part of the Montréal Poker Expo. There are already over 600 entries to this event, with still 2 more flights to go.
The Tournament Hall at Playground Poker Club
Tournament Hall - Event 1 Day 1b
Day 1b of Event 1 is nearing the end of level two, and registration has climbed to over 300 entries! Players are still streaming in and taking part of this massive opening event, as registration is still open for a little more than an hour.
Tournament Hall – Event 1 Day 1b
Guy Carbonneau (left), Éric Desjardins (middle) and Karl Dykhuis (right)
The Montréal Poker Expo kicked off this morning with Day 1a of the Strike Out Cancer Charity Event, and 238 players made their way to take part in this massive opening event. With three more starting flights to go, we can expect the $100,000 guaranteed to be met and well surpassed!
Day 1b has just begun, and already 245 players have taken their seats, including hockey legends such as Guy Carbonneau, Éric Desjardins and Karl Dykhuis. Late registration will remain opened until the end of the first break, or roughly 9:40pm, so players still have over 2 hours to come and join the action.
There are two more starting flights scheduled for tomorrow, with Day 1c at 11:00am, and Day 1d at 7:30pm. Be sure not to miss your chance to play with some of hockeys biggest names!
See you on the felts!
Guy Carbonneau (left), Éric Desjardins (middle) and Karl Dykhuis (right)
Day 1a of the Strike Out Cancer event in the Montréal Poker Expo attracted a huge field of 238 entries – a very strong number for the first of four starting flights. After 13 levels of play, just 59 players remained. Those players have all qualified for Day 2, which is to begin on Sunday August 23rd at 12pm.
Note that any player who played in Day 1a, whether they qualified or not, may play in one or more additional starting flights. In the event that a player qualifies in two or more Day 1s, only their largest stack will move forward to Day 2. We will provide detailed records of any such activity when the official seating draw for Day 2 is released on Saturday night.
Note that these are unverified player-counted chip counts. All chips have been sealed in bags until they return to play on Day 2.
| First Name | Last Name | Chip Count |
|---|---|---|
| Gianfranco | Giordano | 222,300 |
| Pierre Marc | Chadi | 178,000 |
| Alain | Couture | 153,000 |
| Louis-Oliver | Gauthier | 143,000 |
| Olivier | Lamarre | 142,700 |
| John | Toth | 138,400 |
| Jason | Mottershead | 138,000 |
| David | Janes | 132,700 |
| Said | Michailidis | 131,100 |
| Leo | Hackenbroch | 126,300 |
| Min | Qiu | 126,100 |
| Guillaume | Cote | 124,800 |
| Vicenzo | Delia | 124,500 |
| Mikael | Abittan | 123,000 |
| Isham | Yamani | 121,400 |
| Neal | Freeman | 116,000 |
| Bharat | Shetty | 110,600 |
| Michel | Gagne | 110,600 |
| Yvon Robert | Blais | 102,800 |
| Edouard | Dupuis | 95,000 |
| Kiril Martinov | Gelev | 93,400 |
| Kendrick | Banks | 83,200 |
| Marcel | Deschamps | 83,000 |
| Daniel | Dasgostino | 82,800 |
| Russel | Turner | 81,000 |
| Francois | Maurice | 80,600 |
| Karl | Bergeron | 76,100 |
| Sylvain | Aziz | 72,000 |
| Hope | Stacey | 71,600 |
| Hezkiel | Menache | 70,000 |
| Alexandre | Rouleau-Ouellet | 69,600 |
| Felix | Sides | 69,200 |
| Kenneth | Ransom | 64,000 |
| Francois | Cholette | 62,400 |
| Celine | Robert | 61,000 |
| Ioannis | Pentefountas | 60,400 |
| Michael | Mellor | 59,000 |
| Georges | Hallak | 58,000 |
| Michel | Jalbert | 57,700 |
| Sylvie | Pelletier | 52,700 |
| Jean-Philippe | Leclerc | 50,500 |
| Anthony D | Meli | 46,200 |
| Alexandre | Ricard | 45,700 |
| Debra Ann | Holman | 44,200 |
| Christian | Ricard | 42,000 |
| Martin | Archambault | 42,000 |
| Tony | Farcy | 39,800 |
| Navid | Khosravi | 37,400 |
| Denis | Levesque | 37,000 |
| Daniel | Thibodeau | 36,500 |
| Lydwinda | John | 34,500 |
| Igor | Gamayunov | 33,000 |
| Giovanni | Di Cosmo | 31,300 |
| Guillaume | Massicotte | 31,100 |
| Alain | Binette | 29,700 |
| Stephane | Sevigny | 28,300 |
| Domenico | Gentile | 28,200 |
| Kerwin | Carallo | 27,700 |
| David Elliott | Marrache | 25,000 |
The remaining players are now playing their last 5 hands of this first starting flight of the Strike Out Cancer charity event! The remaining players at the end of these final hands will count and bag their chips – everyone left has qualified for Day 2 on Sunday.
All players in today’s flight – even those who have qualified – are allowed to play in additional starting flights. One entry per flight per player is permitted.
We’ll publish a full list of surviving players with their chip counts as soon as the list is available.
As level 11 gets underway we found that there’s a new leader in Day 1a of the Strike Out Cancer Charity event in the Montréal Poker Expo. Pierre Marc Chadi had enough chips to put him in 2nd place at the last break – but since the break he has accumulated almost 100K more – he’s sitting on over 192K at the moment with almost 3 full levels left in the day.
Pierre Marc Chadi
| Name | Chip Count |
|---|---|
| Gianfranco Giordano | 154,000 |
| Pierre Marc Chadi | 102,000 |
| Mikael Abittan | 84,000 |
| Hope Stacey | 80,000 |
| Felix Sides | 77,000 |
Gianfranco Giordano
Being among the leaders in a Day 1 of a multi-day tournament seems to be a comfortable spot for Gianfranco – he was the overall leader of Day 1a in a similar event we hosted during the recent Playrgound Winter Festival as well.
Another Montreal hockey legend is in the building today – Guy Lapointe is here. With Larry Robinson, that means that 2/3 of the Big Three are here at Playground Poker Club today!
Mr. Lapointe and the rest of the players still in the event will be taking their second break of the day in about 15 minutes, and during the break we’ll put together a complete list of chip leaders with more precise counts for each.
