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!”

No surprise there! Michael is the definite leader after 16 levels. The remaining 22 players went on break and we took the opportunity to survey the scene.

Malm’s last hand has catapulted him to the top of the leaderboard once again. Whereas at the last break Michael was leading by a relatively small margin, now his lead is outstanding.

There are four other players with stacks above 200,000 chips. Ashley Whissell has a very respectable stack of 287,000, and is followed closely by Marc-André Larouche, Carrie Webster and Nick Nickoletopoulos.

The last hand before the break must have made Michael Malm’s day. Michael had been among the chip leaders all night and already had quite a big stack in front of him. His only opponent in this had was Vsevolod Malamud, and he too, had a huge stack.

When we got to the table both players were all-in on a board. Both players turned their hands over:

Michael :

Vsevolod:

Both players had hit trips on the turn, hence the all-ins. Michael did not have many outs, but one of them showed its face on the river: ; full house for Micheal, and a cooler for Vsevolod!

This was the last hand before the break and it took Michael (and the dealer) almost every minute of the break to transfer all the chips to him and to re-stack them. By far the biggest stack of this tournament so far. There was no doubt who would be on top of the next leaderboard.

The tournament now enters level 13 and the eliminations are still going strong. There are now 40 players left and the number of tables has now shrunk to four.

Day 1A qualified 15 players yesterday, and this morning’s Day 1B saw 20 more players make the cut. Tonight’s Day 1C will see 16 players add their names to the distinguished list and come back tomorrow to duke it out in Day 2.

Here are a few photos of the players in action.

After level 11, the players took a short break, which gave us the opportunity to check-out the scene.

Roaming between the 6 tables left, one thing was abundantly clear: not one player is emerging as a huge leader. Once again, the leaderboard shows a small number of chips between the first and last player.

With our scope set on stacks 100K+, we honed-in on 6 players. Three players from the previous leaderboard have managed to stay among the leaders. But a few newcomers are quickly gaining ground and are showing no signs of slowing down.

The elimination rate is steady and there are now 80 players remaining in Day 1C of the Playground 100.

As the players hit the rail, the tables are shrinking and the chips are climbing. With over 3 million chips in play, there is a lot of action to be had.

We took a few photos of the players from the previous level.