The players in the Monster Stack have just returned from their latest break, and Richard Kerkerian has built up a massive chip lead over the field.

The money bubble is rapidly approaching, as only 64 of the 454 entries remain in contention, and the top 55 finishers will earn at least $1,500. The blinds have just increased to 5K/10K, meaning that the chip average provides roughly 21 big blinds. There are many stacks of more than double the chip average in the field so there is still lots of room to maneuver for all but the shortest stacks.

Here are the current chip leaders:

Day 2 of the Monster Stack is approaching the bubble. There are 55 places paid and we are now down to 66 players. There will be a break in a few minutes and we will be sure to bring you chip counts.

Here are a few photos of earlier levels.

Play is going strong her today in Day 2 of the Monster Stack. The action is intense, and the players have kept a steady momentum going into level 16.

The players took a short break and we went looking for our chip leaders. We found the largest stack of 394,500 chips in front of Khalid Waziri. Khalid started the day as fourth chip holder today.

Lucas Drolet, who bagged the most yesterday (367,000), has maintained his stack count up to now. There were also four other players with more than 300,000 chips so it’s anybody’s game right now.

There is no rest for the wicked, as play resumes here for our 76 remaining players.

The tournament hall is already buzzing with activity, and another tournament is set to continue. Event #3, the Monster Stack, will pick up where the action left off yesterday with 145 players remaining and play until there is a winner.

This event drew a starting field of 454 players, enough to nearly double the $150,000 guarantee on the prize pool. Of those remaining, Lucas Drolet has a healthy lead over his rivals with 367,000 in chips bagged from yesterday’s action. Drolet’s stack is 60,000 ahead of his nearest competitor, Edward Hislop. But there is a long way to go in this one, so there’s time for everything to change before a champion is crowned.

Good luck to all!

The Monster Stack event attracted a massive field of 454 players who played through 12 levels on Day 1. At the end of the night, there were 145 players remaining who will move to Day 2 at 1:00pm on Tuesday August 28th. Seats have been redrawn, and when play resumes, the remaining players will be seated according to following table.

Click or tap on the column headers to sort the table (for example, to view by stack size).

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.