Until a couple of nights ago, Barry Price was this tournament's overall chip leader with 183,800 chips but was overtaken by France's Juen Alban. Price has just edged back in front after taking some chips from Mathew Frankland.
Price open-limped from early position and two seat to his left was Mathew Frankland who checked his hole cards before raising to 700. The action passed back around to Price and he re-raised to 2,200 in total. Frankland called and the dealer spread the flop.
Price continued with a 3,100 bet, which priced Frankland out of the hand, leaving Price to scoop the pot.
It's incredibly odd to be covering a poker tournament on the hallowed pitch at Wembley. Not least because it takes an age to get from the pitch to the press room (we're fairly high amongst the heavens here) but having never covered anything like this it makes this experience truly unique.
How many people play is dependent on the live buy-ins, there are roughly 500 live and online qualifiers so we're expecting runner numbers could be anything really between 600 and 800, but that is just an estimate on our behalf.
With €1,000,000 up for grabs for the eventual winner, the ISPT has attracted some big names to its Day 2a. Take a look at some of the marquee players we have spotted in the crowd so far today.
The chip leader at the start of Day 2 is Juen Alban. The Frenchman sits down on the hallowed turf of Wembley Stadium armed with 187,347 chips, which equates to a colossal 937 big blinds!
Other big stacks include Barrie Price (183,800), Adebayo Odetoyinbo (170,275), Yung Hon Ngan (150,200) and Nicolas Cardyn (136,593).
The players are starting to make their way down the steps to the tournament area and we should be all set to go within the next 15-20 minutes.
The International Stadiums Poker Tour Wembley Stadium Main Event has finally arrived and in just a few hours time hundreds of poker players will descend on the home of English football, Wembley Stadium, for the live section of this fabulous event.
Over the past few weeks, several Day 1s have played out on various online poker sites around the world. These Day 1s cost €300 to enter and saw the top 10% of each field progress to Day 2. From Day 2 until the tournament's conclusion on June 5, all play will take place on the hallowed turf of Wembley Stadium.
Those players who played on the various Day 1s will start Day 2 with however many chips they ended with on Day 1, although the blinds are rolled back to 100/200. Players who buy in directly on Day 2a or Day 2b will sit down with 50,000 chips, or 250 big blinds.
As you would expect from such a unique poker tournament, some of the best and most recognisable players in the world have chosen to play in the ISPT Wembley Stadium Main Event instead of jetting off to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. Keep an eye out for the likes of Roberto Romanallo, Toby Lewis, The Hendon Mobsters; Ross Boatman, Barney Boatman, Joe Beevers and Ram Vaswani. Also playing on Day 2 are Sam Trickett, Michael Mizrachi, David Benyamine, and two of the most vocal men in the game David "Devilfish" Ulliott and the infamous Antanas "Tony G" Guoga.
ISPT Wembley
As you can see from the picture above, Wembley Stadium is now also the home to a pop-up poker village, which should help to keep everyone warm and dry when the heavens inevitably open and drench London with torrential rain. There is no rain forecast until Tuesday, but this is the United Kingdom after all!
Day 2a kicks off at 12:00 today and will continue until nine 60-minute levels are completed. There is to be a 20-minute break at the end of levels 2, 4 and 8 and a 60-minute dinner break at the end of Level 6. PokerNews' Live Reporting team will be on the ground from the second tournament director, and birthday boy, Simon Trumper issues the order to his dealers to shuffle up and deal until the moment the ISPT Wembley Stadium champion is crowned. That champion is guaranteed to take home at least €1,000,000 for their efforts. Who will become poker's latest millionaire? Keep your browsers locked to PokerNews.com this week to find that out.
flop.
