Right alongside the Main Event, Day 3 of the World Poker Tour Amsterdam €6,000 High Roller has started. What started out as a two-day tournament, it needed a third day after play was still quite deep last night.
Jack Salter and Jason Wheeler have started just now. Salter returned with 2.415 million in chips and started out with a lead over Wheeler, who had 1.385 million, but Wheeler won some chips early on by successfully raising buttons and a three-bet that initiated a fold from Salter.
Over on one of the first tables we spotted in the poker room, we noticed two of poker's biggest stars side by side. Three-time World Poker Tour champion Anthony Zinno will be flanked by two-time WPT and three-time World Series of Poker champion Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi.
Mizrachi ranks 11th in the world on the all-time money list with $14.6 million in career earnings, and in total he has five seven-figure scores on his poker résumé.
Zinno had a breakout performance at the 2013 Borgata Poker Open World Poker Tour event when he beat Vanessa Selbst heads up for the title. Less than two years later Zinno won two more WPT events, the 2015 LAPC and the 2015 Fallsview Poker Classic. In total Zinno has $3.1 million in career earnings, and he ranks 13th on the GPI 300 list.
In about two and a half hours, the first-ever World Poker Tour Main Event in Holland will commence. After a successful WPT National event in Holland Casino Valkenburg last year, won by Niels van Leeuwen and a third-place finish for Marcel Lüske, it's now time for the real deal with a complete poker festival in the nation's capital of Amsterdam.
The WPT festival in Amsterdam is already in full swing, as the €6,000 High Roller started on Saturday and the €330 WPT Warm Up event completed yesterday.
The High Roller was scheduled as a two-day event, but there are still two players remaining, and they'll battle it out for the first-place prize of €125,000 today. Jason Wheeler and Jack Salter will go head to head at 2 p.m. local time, and PokerNews.com will bring you the latest news on that event as well.
Also at 2 p.m. local time, the WPT Main Event will have its first of two flights. With a buy-in of €3,300, Main Event players will have the option to reenter once each day. The starting stack is 30,000, and the maximum capacity per day is 150 players.
PokerNews.com will be in Amsterdam the entire week to bring you all the updates you can ask for. With photos from acclaimed WPT photographer Alin Ivanov and videos from the WPT team, PokerNews.com will be your one-stop shop this week for everything WPT Amsterdam!
The level duration for both starting days is 60 minutes, going to 90-minute levels from Day 2 onwards. It's up to tournament director Christian Scalzi's discretion to decide how many levels will be played on Day 1a and 1b. We are, however, expecting to see at least eight levels, and possibly 10.