Johnny Lodden is over the 200,000 mark after he managed to turn a flush against Mathew Frankland's - the latter having made a pair of aces which was drawing dead.
When we walked up to the table, there was a battle of the blinds in progress. It was Ilan Boujenah in the small and Mikhail Shalamov in the big, and there had been some action prior to our arrival that we can't suss out for certain. In any event, Shalamov had 26,500 chips out in front of his stack, and Boujaneh had reraised to 41,000 out of position. Shalamov spent a long while deliberating, but he eventually double-checked his cards and mucked them.
Boujehan was pleased. He flashed the and said, "Don't play with me." He showed his other card too, the , and the dealer pushed him the pot to chip him up to about 300,000.
Alexander Petersen raised to 5,100 on the button and Mike McDonald made it 15,100 from the small blind, Petersen responded with a four-bet to 27,100 and 'Timex' stared intently at his opponent before he made it 49,900 to go.
Petersen took about 30 seconds before moving all in and the decision was back on the chip leader. While there was no snap-call, McDonald's body language to seemed to suggest he wasn't entirely sure of the validity of Petersen's all in move and for a minute or two it looked like he might well make the call.
Finally though, he folded and Petersen flipped the .
We were across the room when the money got in, but our bloggers' intuition lets us make an educated guess. Nicolas Levi was likely the under-the-gun raiser with , and Alex Kravchenko had 56,300 chips with which to three-bet shove from the button. He was flipping with , and the dealer would grant him a double.
The board ran out , and Kravchenko is back up into six figures and smiling broadly.
Good morning from sunny Spain, and welcome back for Day 3 of the EPT Madrid Main Event.
A field full of 477 players kicked this thing off a couple days ago, and that number has been reduced to 112 here at the halfway point. Among them are five members of Team PokerStars Pro: Team Pros Alex Kravchenko (52,000), Henrique Pinho (61,400), Angel Guillen (95,000), and Johnny Lodden (180,900); and from Team Online, Javier Dominguez (141,700) and Mikhail Shalamov (172,600) will be returning as well to try and claim one for the keyboard warriors.
Other notables still working towards a deep run include David Benyamine, Melanie Weisner, Dermot Blain, Rupert Elder, Kevin MacPhee, Bruno "Kool Shen" Lopes, and Toby Lewis.
And that's excluding the top ten, which is filled with some familiar faces as well. Mike "Timex" McDonald is the overall chip leader, and he's put himself in as good a position as possible to become the tour's first-ever double champion. McDonald bagged up 409,800 chips last night, just a couple chips ahead of Frederik Jensen's 404,500. In the sub-400 club are Dmitry Vitkind (368,000), McLean Karr (330,700), and Erich Kollmann (275,500).
Our remaining players have just begun to file into the building, and the chip bags are coming out from hiding. Play gets under way in just about 15 minutes, and we expect to reduce our field down to 24 players before bagging back up.