Dong Kim’s Quest For Tournament Success Continues Here On Day 2!
Welcome to PokerNews' Day 2 coverage of the 2015 PokerStars.net APPT Seoul.
After eight levels, the starting field of 241 players to down to just 91 hopefuls following both Day 1 sessions. On Day 1b, online heads up No Limit Hold'em phenom Dong Kim entered, and he survived the day with 82,700 chips. Kim grinded his way up from the lowest stakes and now belongs in an elite category of heads-up specialists that including Dan Cates, Doug Polk and Team PokerStars Pro Online Ike Haxton, but a big tournament score is still lacking from on his poker resume. Kim has expressed his desire to do well in tournaments, and coming into today we like his chances.
On top of the chip counts is Takihiro Nakai with 186,700, well out in front of his nearest competitor. Rounding out the top seven (and the only seven players with six-figure stacks) are Hajime Iwakura (153,900), Hirotoshi Nakabo (135,200), Day 1a end-of-day chip leader Alex Ward (133,800), Masato Yokosawa (106,100), Tyler Jennens and Yunye Lu (101,100) who is currently sitting in second place in the race for the Asia Player of the Year title.
Notables still in the field include PokerStars Team Pros Bryan Huang (79,900), Aditya Agarwal (34,500) and Celina Lin (33,400), the past two APPT Seoul champions Chane Kampanatsanyakorn (17,100) and Aaron Lim (62,200), Australian regulars Toan Nguyen (91,200), Minh Nguyen (49,100) and Jesse McKenzie (37,600) as well as a contingent of female pros including Yu Kurita (57,500), Juicy Li (41,600) and Kitty Kuo (27,400).
Play is set to resume at noon local time, about an hour from now, and we will play twelve more levels today. Be sure to keep it here at PokerNews throughout the day for updates on all of the action.