The final table saw some roller coaster action, but two players ultimately came to the fore and bagged the majority of the chips in play. Francis Dery continued his strong, aggressive play and kept steadily building his stack. But it was Jason Mottershead who made the largest gains at the final table; he ran hot and had good timing to help run up the largest stack in the tournament so far. As play at the final table continued, the disparity between the chip leaders, Dery and Mottershead, and the rest of the field became larger and larger as the two biggest stacks showed no signs of slowing down.

The bubble burst when Jean Guy Pare, who was down to less than 3 big blinds, found himself committed in the big blind. The action was opened by Joe-Elie Assio, who was holding , and Pare put in his chips with . The board posed no threat to the aces and Pare was eliminated in sixth place.

Day 1B qualifiers

We are down to the final 10 players of Day 1B. Going in to the final table, Francis Dery has maintained his chip lead, but anything can happen at this stage. The average stack is now 96,000, for nearly 20 big blinds.

With 105 entries (including re-entries) through the first two Day 1s, the Crazy $80 is on pace for some overlay.

What’s an overlay, you ask? When there’s a prize pool guarantee, the overlay is the amount that has to be made up between the prize pool generated by buy-ins and the guaranteed amount. It’s a great value for players because the tournament is just a little bit easier to navigate with fewer players in the field – but the prize pool remains the same!

There are two more Day 1s to be played, one tomorrow and the other on Thursday, each offering unlimited re-entries during the first four levels of play. In past events, we`ve seen a tendency for the later start flights to draw larger fields and more re-entries but nothing is guaranteed, except for the $20,000 prize pool, so head down to Playground for a chance to get some of that value!

The buzzer has sounded to signal the second break of today’s flight. 33 players remain out of a starting field of 45 entries. 5 players will advance to Friday’s day 2.

Although fewer players registered today than for Day 1A, we expect tomorrow’s Day 1C and Thursday’s Day 1D to draw much larger fields as the chances to advance to Day 2 dwindle.

At this point, nobody has built a monster stack but several players have accumulated nearly twice the current chip average of 29,100. Michel Latendresse leads them all with a stack of 64,400.