There has to be a bubble. Always. Unfortunately for him, tonight it was Dat Doan’s turn. But let’s start at the beginning.
With 17 players left and only 16 players moving on to Day 2, the action was stopped and the tournament director instructed the dealers to go into “hand per hand” mode, as is the custom whenever the tournament is on the bubble.
The blinds were 5K/10K and Joshua Vincent Peteigny was in trouble. Card dead, he was nursing vapors and the blinds were coming… fast. The problem for Joshua, aside from the obvious chip-flow problem, was that most of the chip leaders were on his table. Standing alone in the shadow of the huge stacks after him, it did not bode well for him at all.
With only 20,500 chips to his name, Joshua pushed forward 10K for the ante, and another 10K for the big blind. Micheal Malm made an early raise to 50,000 and Marc-André Larouche called. In an almost fairy tale twist, Joshua did the unthinkable… When the action came around to him, he folded.
Trying to suppress their reactions because the hand was still live, most of the players at the table were displaying astounded expressions on their faces. “Why keep just 500 behind?” their eyes were saying. The board came out: 
, Marc-André shoved and Micheal folded, putting an end to the hand. That’s when all heck broke loose. No one could understand why Joshua had folded. “And I would have hit two pairs on that flop!”, he said.
In the next hand, Joshua was automatically all-in for 500. With three players staying in the hand, Joshua was looking at a possible sweep of 12,000 chips. Sure enough, the young man won the hand with the help of his 
hole cards. On the button in the next hand, he also won his all-in. Now holding close to 40,000 chips, Joshua sat back and waited. Sure enough, an all-in was won by Walter Asatoorian against Dat Doan on the adjoining table. Dat had gone all-in with 
and ran face first into Walter’s 
. The rockets held, thus turning Dat into the bubble and putting an end to this last Day 1 flight of the Playground 100.
Congratulations to Nick Nickoletopoulos for bagging an astounding 586,500 chips tonight. So after 3 Day 1 flights, there will be a total of 51 players qualified for Day 2 tomorrow at 1:00PM.
Joshua Vincent Peteigny: “A chip and a chair!”
