The Real Work Begins

Three days of tournament poker have whittled a starting field of 477 hopefuls here at the APPT Sydney Grand Final down to 219 contenders. With the initial culling of the herd complete, the players' work has just begun. Only 48 of them, or about a quarter of the remaining field, will see any return on their investment of time and money.

The field will combine for the first time when Day 2 play kicks off in about one hour's time. Accumulating 95,000 chips during any of the Day 1 flights (or almost five times the starting stack) got a player into the top ten in Day 2 chip counts. The players that managed that feat are:

Jason Gray - 184,000 (Day 1b leader)
Gavin Griffin - 134,700
Phil Willcocks - 129,000 (Day 1a leader)
Vince Ha - 123,800
Manish Sansi - 103,600 (Day 1c leader)
Steven Musca - 103,200
Daniel Kowalski - 98,500
Patrick Carron - 98,300
Christopher Lee - 95,900
Wang Che Jung - 95,300

The tentative plan today is to play another seven levels, with the day concluding at approximately 11pm local time. We'll see how that shakes out when we get underway at 12:30pm. See you then!