Nicolas Chouity Rockets to the Top of Day 1b at EPT Campione
What a day today was! We warmed up with 178 players yesterday and today we really went for it at the PokerStars.com EPT Campione as we near filled the room with 392 players. It’s a pretty big room too. The total of 570 players helped produce a prize pool of €2,764,500. A cool €640,000 of that will go to the winner and the minimum a player can win stands at €7,500 for an 88th place finish.
The stars of the poker world came out in force today but one player out-shone all others today, and that was our end of day chip leader Nicolas Chouity. The former EPT Grand Final champion battled to an impressive 165,900 chips. A lot of those chips came in an end of day tussle with Vanessa Selbst. She came into the press room to say, “Six-bet shoved into aces!” The American had jack-nine suited and was drawing dead by the turn.
He won’t be able to rest on his laurels though as he's amongst an end of day top ten that looks as follows:
| Position | Name | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nicolas Chouity | 165,800 |
| 2 | Andrea Benelli | 163,400 |
| 3 | Stefano Demontis | 154,700 |
| 4 | Andrey Gulyy | 138,000 |
| 5 | Andras Kovacs | 131,900 |
| 6 | Calvin Anderson | 126,500 |
| 7 | Andrey Demidov | 125,500 |
| 8 | Jannick Wrang | 121,400 |
| 9 | Fabrice Soulier | 115,700 |
| 10 | Bryan Piccoli | 112,900 |
All those trail to Davide Andreoni though, the day 1a chip leader, who will come back for day 2 as the overall leader with 175,100.
Four times as many PokerStars Team Pros came to play today. They had a mostly successful day as 13 of the 16 who played made it through. Here’s how they ended up: Arnaud Mattern (21,000), Matthias De Meulder (73,200), Eugene Katchalov (59,800), Liv Boeree (43,600), ElkY (90,200), Dag Palovic (7,600), Pier Paolo Fabretti (39,100), Max Martinez (31,800), Victor Ramdin (50,800) and Fatima Moreira de Melo (14,900) are all still in with a chance.
Luca Moschitta, Dario Minieri, Salvatore Bonavena, and Lex Veldhuis all came, battled, but failed to win for their badge. Minieri’s end when he ran the mighty 
in to Irene Baroni’s pocket rockets. Bonavena flopped top pair, moved all in, but was flushed away by Bryn Kenney. Veldhuis’ kicker let him down as he fell to Benelli.
Day 2 starts tomorrow at 2pm CET. All the 325 remaining players will be in the same room and the plan is to play all the way to when the official PokerStars Party starts at 10pm on a boat on Lake Lugano.