Day 1a Wraps Up
The first day of play at the 2011 PokerStars.net APPT Macau Main Event is in the books. Eight, 60-minute levels were played on Day 1a and the field that came out totaled 269 players. Heading the pack at the end of the day was Shih-Chieh Su with 171,800 in chips.
Overshadowing the big story of the kickoff of this amazing event was the return of Phil Ivey. Rumors had circulated recently about Ivey being in Macau. Those rumors turned into more rumors when it was mentioned that he'd be playing this very event. The rumors then turned to truths when Ivey showed up and took his seat during Level 2.
Ivey was quiet during the day as far as verbal volume goes, but his chip stack proved to be quite noisy during the day. He played plenty of pots and his stack was all the way up to around 95,000 at one point. At the end of the day, though, Ivey only finished on 51,200 in chips, but he'll be back for Day 2 on Friday.
Other notables coming out to play on Day 1a were Grant Levy, Julian Powell, David Steicke, Jackson Zheng and Team PokerStars' Raymond Wu, Alex Kravchenko and Mickey Petersen. They'll all be moving on to Day 2 and enjoy a day off tomorrow.
Some of the players who failed to make it through the day were Mark Vos, Emanuel "Curly" Seal, Andrew Hinrichsen, Jonathan Karamalikis, Michael Pedley and Ori Miller.
Day 1b will kick off on Thursday at noon local time here in Macau. The beautiful Grand Lisboa and PokerStars Macau will be the host once again as an expected field of 300 or so players will be out in full force. Be sure to come right back to PokerNews then.