Wayne Zielinski Bags Overall Lead in HPT Daytona Beach Main Event
Day 1c of the Heartland Poker Tour $1,100 Main Event at the Daytona Beach Racing and Card Club has now completed. The final flight saw a total of 214 registration slips sold and when the last chance saloon had closed for business only 41 remained, bringing the total of all three flights to 79.
Emerging as the leader from Day 1c was Wayne Zielinski with an outstanding 446,000 to end the night, a stack that was also good to secure an overall lead headed into Day 2. Zielinski was under the radar for the better part of the day and it was not until he found a double with his pocket kings against aces that he really started to gain traction.
After cracking aces, Zielinski went on a tear, eliminating anyone in his way en route to grabbing the monster to stack he ended the night with. The biggest pot of the night for him came when he held two queens against pocket nines and his ladies held on to push him over the 400,000 mark, being the first to do so.
A star-studded field showed up today for the action but one familiar face stood out more than most as 2018 WSOP Main Event Runner Up Tony Miles managed to find a healthy-sized stack of 278,000 by the end of the night. Miles took a shot in the first two flights but didn't manage to get any wind under his sails, but he came back for another shot in the last flight and now sits among the top headed into Day 2.
Some other noticeably sized stack that emerged from this flight are Martin Borras (366,000), Aaron Speer (282,000), Josias Santos (268,000), Aaron Vaughan (245,000), and Michael Tait (224,000).
A lot of widely-known players managed to back up as well, including Brandon Caputo (217,000), Corey Zedo (210,000), Hamid Izadi (168,000), David Anderson (163,000), Toby Boas (154,000), Founder & CEO of Faded Spade Tom Wheaton (129,000), and Eric Salazar (117,000).
All of the remaining 79 players will come back tomorrow at 12:10 p.m. local time to battle it out for a shot at a final table appearance that will be streamed live on Monday, October 28. The players will be resuming on blind level 16 with the blinds set at 2,000/5,000 and a big blind ante of 5,000. The day will continue on 40-minute levels and will not stop until the official final table is set, and only then will players bag up for Day 3.
The PokerNews live reporting team will be here to bring you all of the updates in the HPT Daytona Beach Main Event, so stay tuned as all of the action unfolds.