The players went on a short break after level 9, during which the tournament staff raced off the T25 chips, and we took this opportunity to create a leaderboard of the top chip stacks. At the moment, it’s Jonathan Meyer who leads the way, and he is over 100,000 chips richer than any other player in this room.

1. Jonathan Meyer – 283,000
2. Ron Shephard – 182,000
3. Shakeeb Kazempur – 150,000
4. Vartan Azoumanian – 134,000
5. Faisal Khan – 132,000
6. Denis Quirion – 127,000
7. George Halak – 123,000
8. Ricky Shamshoum – 120,000
   

   Jonathan Meyer

Over a third of the field has already been eliminated through the first 9 levels of this flight of the Main Event, and some notable eliminations include: Patrick Braga, Josue Sauvageau, Ami Alibay, Carla Sabini, Daniel Gagnon and Alexandre Lavigne.

The tournament changed to a 9-handed format during this past level, and will remain that way until we have our unofficial final table of 10 players.

Photographs taken during levels 8 and 9:

At this stage of the tournament, the chip lead will often shift from one hand to another. We just arrived at the end hand on table 54 which seems to have created our new tournament chip leader. Apparently all the chips went in the middle between Noy and Shakeeb Kazempur on a flop of , where Noy was holding a pair of , and was far behind the of Shakeeb. With no help on the turn and river ( ), Noy saw almost all of his chips slide over to his right, in a pot of close to 200,000.

Noy was eliminated in the next hand, while Shakeeb seems to have taken over the chip lead of Day 1B.

Here are a few photographs taken during level 7:

The break following level 6 has ended and with that comes the end of late registration in the Main Event. The 315 entries today, added to the 179 from yesterday adds up to a total of 494 entries. That means there is a very small overlay in the event. Tournament staff is working on preparing the final prize pool and payout information now and we’ll have that information to publish shortly.

Interestingly enough, the leader after 6 levels has slightly less chips than the chip leader after 3 levels! After 6 levels of play, local regular Fadi Haddad is in charge of the field, being the only player above the 100,000 at this stage of the tournament. Here is a look at the top 5, along with their estimated chip counts:

1. Fadi Haddad – 114,000
2. Vartan Arzoumanian – 95,500
3. Noy – 95,000
4. Marc-Andre Racine – 88,000
5. Jonathan Meyer – 87,000

Playground Poker Club has an active tournament scene with over 75 scheduled tournaments per month, ranging from $60 to $165 each (not including special events). At the top end of this range, tournament players frequently play with/against established professionals, while the lower end is a great introduction to tournament poker for players of all backgrounds.

Over the past few years the community has been quite strong, and the quality of play is such that those daily regulars are very comfortable playing in much bigger events – and a lot of them are in the field today.

Some of the more talented and/or experienced among our “locals” in the action today:

• Noy
• Nick Nickoletopoulos
• David Bolduc Hamel
• Luciano Iacovella
• Levon Dedayen
• Marc-Andrée Racine
• Tomas Larivee Magni
• Steve Toulch
• Linda Huard
• Dany Hamel Boulay
• Fadi Haddad
• Michael Mellor
• Jamieson Flores
• Nick Soller
• Rick Shamshoum
• Diana Shamshoum
• Andy D’Allesandro
• Kathy Sawers

Here are a few more photos of the action today.

Photos from level 4 and 5

Play has been completed through 3 levels today and while players were on their first break of the day, we surveyed the room to put together the initial leaderboard in today’s flight.

1. Nabil Assaff – 116K
2. Conrado Corpus – 96K
3. Vartan Arzoumanian – 90K

Behind these clear leaders, there are many players trailing closely in the 65K – 75K range.

It’s remarkable that these three players have grown their stacks to beyond 3x of the starting stack in just 3 levels of play – but none of them will feel comfortable since there’s so much time left to play today. A big stack in level 4 guarantees a player… nothing at all!