The Monster Stack Day 1 tournament has come to an end after 12 levels of strategic poker. The pace was pretty consistent all day and players were eliminated slowly. In general we witnessed an intense style of play typical for deep stack tournaments. In total 145 players managed to bag chips for Day 2 which is set to get underway tomorrow at 1:00pm. Play will continue tomorrow until a winner is crowned.

The chip leader going into Day 2 is Lucas Drolet, who dropped 367,000 chips in his bag. Right behind Drolet, the next 5 players have all managed to bag over 200,000 each so this means the difference between the top 6 players is not very big, and definitely will not allow complacency. Top chip leaders have their work cut out for them as then move on to Day 2.

With a dozen players owning stacks hovering around 30,000 less, it will be interesting to see how the play takes off tomorrow. Are the shorter stacks going to make an early run for it? Or, are they going to continue at a steady and calm rhythm and wait for the right hands? There are currently 13,620,000 chips in play, so everything is possible. One of these 149 players will be the proud owner of a WSOP ring tomorrow night.

Tournament staff will perform a full table redraw for Day 2, and we will post the list as soon as it is made available.

Congratulations to all the players who qualified for Day 2.

We witnessed a hand that involved Lucas Drolet who was already sitting on a decent stack before the hand.

With blinds 800/1,600 Bill Kontaratos raised from UTG to 4,000. Players folded to Lucas Drolet who called on the button, with only the blinds left to act. Small blind Richard Johansen shoved all-in for 27,500.

The big blind folded which left Bill with a decision to make. He seemed less interested in Johansen’s all-in than Drolet’s big stack. With Drolet still left to act, Bill took a few minutes and decided to fold. Drolet snap-called and tabled his hand.

Lucas Drolet:

Richard Johansen:

With the ace showing it’s head on the flop, Johansen knew he needed a miracle-induced two outer to win.

The turn: and river: sealed Richard Johansen’s fate and he was eliminated in 168th place.

Bill Kontaratos informed Lucas that Johansen’s shove had saved him, since he (Bill) had folded a better ace. Even though the pot was not huge by any standard, Lucas was very happy to add the chips to his stack.

While the players were on break after level 6 we made a quick tour of the Tournament Tent to find out if any player has managed to stack some serious chips.

The late registration period will continue until 10:45pm, at the begining of level 10. We currently have a total of 444 entries, and 305 players remaining.

Lasha Kapanadze takes the lead with 147,800 chips. But, it’s a very slight lead because Blagojce Jakovljevic is hot on his trail with a decent 134,500 stack. We spotted a few stacks above the 100,000 benchmark:

The Tournament Tent is buzzing here as players keep coming in for the Monster Stack Day 1. With the late registration period closing at around 10:45pm, there is no doubt that we can expect the 357 entries to grow still.

After witnessing 4 days of intense action in the multiple Day 1 flights of the Colossus Tournament, it is quite a change of pace today. In general play is more careful, and players know they are equipped with a lot of chips, which gives them a whole different range of possibilities.

We went around the tables and some of the players caught our eye. Here are a few photos of the players taken in levels 1 and 2.