Day 2 Ends with Forty Happy Players
The action was furious at the beginning of the day, with the pace of eliminations almost reaching one a minute. Tony Dunst was out first, in the first five minutes of play. He was soon followed by Ivan Tan, Andrew Scott, defending champion Van Marcus and every surviving PokerStars Team Asia Pro: none of Celina Lin, Jonathan Lin, Raymond Wu or Bryan Huang made the money. Huang at least goes off to dinner with the knowledge (and, presumably, satisfaction) that his father Jack Ng is still alive heading into Day 3.
If all of those players were eliminated, who's at the top of the leaderboard? In the pole position is Dong-bin Han, with roughly 478,000 chips. He's followed by New Zealander Phillip Willcocks with 435,000. After that, there's a significant fall-off to the rest of the pack. The biggest name left lurking in that pack is Nam Le. Don't ever rule him out.
Tomorrow the remaining forty players will re-convene to play down to a final table of nine. Action kicks off at 12:15pm local time. We'll have update chip counts and the Day 3 table draw posted as soon as we receive that information from the tournament organizers.
Until then, you can find us at the bar.