Day 3 of the 2019 Borgata Fall Poker Open gets underway at an early hour today — 10am — with the third of four starting flights of the $500,000 Guaranteed Kick-Off, Event #3: Deep Stack No Limit Hold'em.
The first two flights ran yesterday and saw a combined total of 453 entrants take to the felt, with only about 70 of them finding a bag at the end of 15 levels.
Borgata tournament regular She Lok "Gary" Wong bagged the biggest stack between flights A & B with 539,000 chips locked and loaded for Day 2. He'll get to take today off from tournament play and rest up for Friday.
Today's two flights should be significantly larger than yesterday's and with 453 entries, they're already more than half-way to covering the guarantee!
The third starting flight of Event #3: $560 Deep Stack NLH is catching air here in the Signature Room. As with all the starting flights, players get 25,000 chips to start and all levels on Day 1 are 30 minutes long. They’ll play through Level 15, then bag up for the night.
Late registration and unlimited re-entries are available until the start of level 13 (about 4:45pm for Flight C). This is also a Best Stack Forward event, meaning players who bag chips in any flight can play a later flight without automatically forfeiting the chips already bagged. Players who manage to bag in more than one starting flight will forfeit all but the largest stack, which they will take into Day 2 on Friday at noon.
Proving that poker is a great equalizer, Attilio Bitondo is on the felt (again) this morning. He fired yesterday, but failed to get chips in a bag.
At the age of 91, he's proven that he can hold his own with the much younger opponents. He won a WSOP Circuit ring in March of 2018, when he was 89, just a few months shy of his 90th birthday. He set and still holds the record as the oldest-ever winner of a WSOP Circuit event.
On a flop of with about 11,000 in the pot, Seat 6 (sb) bet 6,500, then Marc Lesitsky (middle) raised to 47,000 (covering both opponents).
Frank Passantino (button) gave it some thought, then folded. Seat 6 also pondered for a moment, then came to the opposite decision, calling all-in. His (two overcards) was actually ahead with just Ace-high. Lesitsky's (King-high) had a lot of outs with both straight and flush draws.
He picked up the lead when the on the turn gave him a pair and then just had to fade any Aces or Queens. The completed the board and Seat 6 was sent to the rail. Lesitsky chipped up to ~100,000.
A player raised to 25,000 and Mike Lavenburg moved all in for around 73,000. A player directly on Lavenberg's left called their 15,000 stack all in and the original raiser put their 65,000 stack into the middle as well.
Opponent:
Opponent:
Mike Lavenburg:
The board ran out and Lavenburg took down the pot with his set of queens, eliminating two opponents from the tournament.
The third flight of Event #3: $600 Deepstack Kick-Off saw 496 entry slips sold and when the last chance saloon had closed for business, it was Markus Alim leading the 85 surviving players with his 484,000 stack.
Alim was among the larger stacks for the latter stages of the day, continually adding chips as quickly as he could acquire them. He was in a close battle towards the end of the night for the lead but found a hand against Kevin Beri that catapulted him into the chip lead, one in which he retained.
Many well-known players found a bag at the end of the day, including Matthew Zola (366,000), Gilberto Taveras-Garcia (304,000), Frank Funaro (204,000), Jason Rivkin (188,000), Charles Kassin (166,000), Gregory Fishberg (121,000), and Peter Zarriello (50,000).
The 496 entries today brought the total to 949 across the first three starting flights, with Day 1d still left to play. The last starting flight will ned 526 to surpass last years total fo 1,474 and it is looking like a strong possibility.
The remaining players from this flight will combine with the other three starting flight survivors and will return on Friday, November 8 at noon to battle it out on Day 2. Chip counts and seating assignments will be posted before the starting of Day 2.
The PokerNews live reporting team will be bringing all of the live coverage for the remainder of this event, so stay tuned as the action unfolds.