The tournament director instructed the dealers to stop dealing when the tournament was two spots away from being in the money, as play became hand for hand. There were some all-ins happening on different tables, and finally Christian Muset became the first to fall, putting the tournament on to the stone cold bubble.

The chip leader, Diana Shamshoun, had been playing aggressively and steadily chipping up along the way. None the less, she asked the floor if the players could pay the bubble, so as to help out the short stack player. As a hand was in progress, nothing could be arranged as deals cannot be made while a hand is playing.

After a another orbit, Igor Gamayunov, seated to her direct right, was down to only 50k while seated in the big blind. Diana opened UTG to 55k, and as it folded around the table back to Igor, he pushed in his stack and announced “all in”. Diana then commented “I never looked at my cards, but I wanted to help you out by trying to isolate, as I was pretty sure that you would be shoving your big blind”.

Both hands were tabled:
Diana
Igor

The flop came down with a in the window to give Igor the lead, but was followed by the to put Diana ahead.  The 3rd card was the .  Being a good sport, Diana asked the dealer to turn either another J or a 7 in order to help keep Igor in the game, but the on the turn didn’t give him any assistance and neither did the river, .

And just like that, Igor Gamayunov became the official “bubble boy” and the tournament is now in the money, with a min cash payout of at least $780.

The tournament is now on the 1st break of the evening and the field has thinned out considerably and is down to 44 players, which means it is four spots away from being in the money.

Looking around the room, we checked out the chip stacks and found that we now have two people in the Millionaire Club; Diana Shamshoun is still in the lead with a whopping 1,138,000 chips.  Hot on her heels is Jose Juan Gomez Casillas holding 1,014,000.  Following close behind is Playground’s friend from Eastern Ontario, Mitcheal Ferguson, sitting just below 1 mil (912,000).

As we normally see on a Day 2, many of the short stacks have been shoving, hoping for a double up early on so that their stacks can become “more playable”.  Some have doubled up successfully, others have exited the tournament room, and the tournament has already lost 23 players as we write this post.

Some of the recent bustouts include Martin Nguyen, Richard Sysko, Zheng-Yi Xie, Anderson F., Richard Figiel, Kathy Sawers, Karim Abdelhamid, and Ben Menache.

Walking around the room we were able to take a few photos of some of the players in the field.

The players are in their seats, and the tournament staff have just announced, “dealers, shuffle up and deal”

There were 314 players in total who entered the tournament of which 82 bagged and are now seated and ready to play. The chip leader for Day 2 is local player Diana Shamshoun, starting with an impressive 546,000 chips. She is followed by Antoine Simon (449,000), Ramsey Belmazza (446,000) and Christian Soucy (444,000).

The top 40 players will be in the money, with a min cash of $780 in 37th – 40th position, and, the top prize being $32,025 plus a Party Poker Millions Step 3 satellite ticket (value $1,650).