Day 1a of our opening event in this Playground Poker Montreal Festival has come to a close, and 51 players have qualified for Day 2. There are still 3 more opportunities to make it to Day 2, with Day 1b scheduled tonight at 7:30pm, Day 1c at 11 am tomorrow, and Day 1d at 7:30pm tomorrow.

Player stacks will be posted shortly. In the mean time, here are a few photographs taken during the last level of play:

Players will shortly have completed level 12 in Day 1a of Event 1 of the Playground Poker Montreal Festival and have just one more level to play before those who have survived will count and bag their chips to return for Day 2 on Sunday.

In the meantime, there will be three more starting flights for Event 1. Day 1b will start in just over 2 hours (at 7:30pm tonight) and then we’ll do it all again tomorrow with Day 1c at 11am and Day 1d at 7:30.

Players who tried to qualify today but couldn’t make it all the way through will be able to re-enter by joining any of the remaining starting flights. Even a player who has qualified for Day 2 but with a small stack can give it another try – only his or her largest qualifying stack will be put into play in the event that a player qualifies twice.

Players are back from their second (and final) break of the day and while they were away from the tables we took the opportunity to get some up-to-date counts.

With a current chip average of just a hair over 38K, three players have built up truly formidable stacks. Steve Pouliot continues to lead the way – he has built up to just a little over 275K since the last break. Behind him are two players with over 150K each: Brandon Aaron Kitchen (157K) and Stephen Klimasko (150K). A bit further away from the lead are players like Pierre-Paul Gervais and Andrey Vainer who are hovering around the 80K mark.

With a little fewer than 5 levels left it’s clear that anything could happen and some other players are certain to build their own dominant stacks before the end of Day 1a.

Steve Pouliot

Brandon Aaron Kitchen

Stephen Klimasko

Event 1 Day 1a has made it to level 5 and players have just returned from their first break of the day. A total of 259 total players has bought into today’s first flight in Event 1 with three more flights in the event still to follow this one.

There’s also some news to share at this early point in the tournament. Usually, the first session in a Day 1 of a multi-flight tournament is relatively slow-starting – but not this time. One player has used the first 4 levels of the day to chip up significantly – from his 20K starting stack to over 160K!

The player is none other than Steve Pouliot – the same player who won the first event during the Spring Classic in March!

The second chip leader is Stephen Klimasko with 76K followed by perennial leaderboard resident Jonathan Poissant with about 65K.

As usual we will be covering all of the events in the Playground Poker Montreal Festival here on the Event Blog via both news and photographs of the action and the players.

By the way, registration in Day 1a has climbed to 250 players with another 25 minutes or so left to register in the event.

Here is the first batch of photos of players from Day 1a.

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