After 17 online Day 1s and 11 Live Day 1s, 277 entries qualified for Day 2 in this $500,000 Guaranteed event, and when you subtract the players who qualified twice (and whose smaller stack has been removed from play), there are 269 players coming back to start Day 2.
Action gets underway in just seconds, and play will begin at level 13 (blinds 1,500/3,000/a300) and continue through 14 40-moinute levels today, at which time the remaining players will bag up their chips to return on Day 3.
The payout structure will be published shortly, but all Day 2 qualifiers have already been paid $400 into their partypoker account just for making it to Day 2. There will be a number of players today that don’t cash for additional money, but soon enough there will be another small money bubble and payouts will continue past the initial $400 min-cash.
Another element in play today is the Golden Chip Last Longer for online qualifiers. There’s a $20,000 prize for the online Day 2 qualifier who stays in the tournament the longest – we’ll be tracking these results through to the end. There are 73 players participating in this fantastic promotion.
The overall chip leader managed to accumulate over a million in chips from his 30K starting stack – 1,176,300 to be exact. His name is Francois Allard and he starts the day in a commanding position, poised for a deep run in the event. Right behind him is Victor Artemenko with 990,000 chips. Unlike Francois, Victor qualified online – and did so in a very interesting fashion. He didn’t just play through the required number of levels for an online Day 1 – he managed to take out all of the other players in his starting flight and was the only one left standing!
There are some pretty high profile players left in the field, particularly considering the buy-in of just $220: partypoker Ambassador Tony Dunst, Eric Afriat, Michael Malm, Carter Swidler, Scott Montgomery, and Will Molson are all well-known, accomplished players in the field to start Day 2.
Good luck to everyone today!