We just witnessed a hand on table 54 that ran the entire gamut of emotions at the poker table. Both Gary Lucci and Tomislav Pavkovic were relatively short-stacked and both were all-in.

Gary:
Tomislav:

Gary went way out in front on the flop: – Gary flopped his set! But then came the turn and Tomislav let out a whoop as he hit his two-outer to re-take the lead… until the came on the river.

At first neither Gary nor Tomislav noticed that Gary had made a flush to win the hand and double up… But that didn’t last long, and Gary only got one step away from the table before he was informed of his victory in the hand and returned to stack the chips.

Two players have made it to the 100K mark in tournament chips in level 5 – Sylvain Siebert is now playing around 120K and Pierre-Paul Paulin has increased his total to over 100K.

They are certain to be joined by many more at that watermark near the next break!

Players are on their first break of the day and we were able to find 4 “rabbits” who have quickly moved to the front of the pack. Chief among these is Pierre-Paul Paulin, who has just a hair under 3x the starting stack after just 3 levels of play.

Players keep on joining the action in Day 1c of the Main Event – with another 3 hours and 30 minutes left to register, there are already 254 players seated! We’ll capture another round of photos of the early action shortly.

With 208 players seated today, the Main Event has officially surpassed the number of players to meet the $500,000 guarantee that Playground Poker Club placed on this event – but with each additional player, even more value is added to the prize pool.

We’re quite honoured to note that several local players have flown back home from Barcelona, where a record-breaking EPT event is wrapping up, just to make sure they have a chance to play in the Montréal Poker Expo. Marco Caza, Chanracy Khun are two players who have made the effort to get here on time, and if there are others we will try and identify them during the day.

Players are arriving at their assigned tournament tables and play is about to get going in Day 1c of the Montréal Poker Expo Main Event. This is the third of three starting flights in the event, and will almost certainly be larger than either Day 1b or Day 1a – in fact, it may attract as many entries as both of them combined – or close.

There were a total of 186 Satellite winners for this event, and although we have seen several of these players in the event already, the final starting day is by far the biggest day for satellite winners.

As has been the case for each starting flight so far, players will play through 13 45-minute levels today before bagging chips to return on Day 2. There are already 85 players qualified for Day 2 and today should add at least 50 more to the restart list for Monday’s restart.

Good luck to everyone today!