We’re about 20 minutes from the kick off of Day 3 of the Main Event of the PokerStars Canada Cup here at Playground Poker Club. Yesterday the tournament played all the way down to the money bubble (elimination in 73rd place) and no further, so to start Day 3 everyone left alive is in the money. However, with just over $6K for a min-cash and $366,660.00 for first place there’s still a lot to play for.

Expect the action to start out extremely quickly as players who have been nurturing short stacks make their move to get healthy stacks or get paid, but as the day progresses the action should start to slow down as the pay jumps become more substantial.

The tournament will play down today to 27 players, at which time those remaining will bag up their chips and return for Day 4 on Tuesday.

Day 2 of the Main Event of the PokerStars Canada Cup has been completed and there are 72 players left with chips who will return for Day 3 tomorrow. At the outset of today’s play the Tournament Director announced a slight modification to the published tournament schedule – today’s play would continue either a) until the players reached the money at 72 players remaining or b) until the end of the 10th level of the day, whichever came first.

The bubble came (and went) while the tournament was in Level 17, and when the bubble player was eliminated, play stopped and all 72 players in the money bagged their chips to return tomorrow, when play will resume at 11am.

With a new day comes a new random seating draw. Play will resume in the event with players seated according to this chart. Click on a column heading to re-order the table.

Piotr just wrote about a huge pot that vaulted Jonathan Driscoll into the chip lead – and sitting at the next table over almost back-to-back with Jonathan is another huge leader, Domenico Agatiello – known universally at Playground simply as Agi – who also has well over 600K. The two of them – Driscoll at over 680K and Agi at over 630K are both about 200K ahead of the player with the 3rd highest stack.

We’ll be doing a full survey for the big stacks during the next break in 20 minutes.

There’s a pretty wide consensus that Yann is the among the very best of the strong current field of Quebecois poker pros, but although he got his chips in with the lead he couldn’t fade a 3-outer to stay alive in the Canada Cup.

When we arrived at table 33 there was already a ton of action – at least one limp and a called raise, and then Brazilian pro Thiago Nishijima 3-bet to 26K. Action came back to Yann who 4-bet to approximately 55K. This bet folded out the other players and action returned to Thiago, who jammed. Yann was obviously hoping to induce the shove and he instantly called and turned over . Thiago wasn’t strong: , but the flop of was perfect and the run-out couldn’t get Yann back in front.