Mohamed Ait Chaib Takes the Chip Lead after Day 1b; 98 Players Remain
Today 283 entries took their seats at the tables here in sunny Marrakech. This brings the total entries to a number of 426, creating the biggest Marrakech Poker Open event ever with a total of 192 reentries!
Day 1b attracted many hopefuls trying to make it to Day 2 tomorrow here in the beautiful surroundings of Casino de Marrakech in the Es Saadi Resort. At the end of the night, 69 players managed to find a bag to put their chips in to reopen them again tomorrow. Taking the honors topping the chip count today is from Mohamed Ait Chaib with a colossal amount of 500,000 chips, not very far from Diego Sarmiento, the overall chipleader who bagged 538,500 yesterday.
Trailing behind Chaib is Muhammed Hakim after bagging a confortable amount of 338,000 chips. Third in the chip count leaderboard for today is [Removed:445], he will take 330,000 in chips with him to his new table tomorrow. In fourth place, we can find French player Sebastien Compte with 283,500 and closing out the top 5 for today is Spanish David with 257,000 chips.
Gaelle Baumann succeeded at finding a bag at the end of the day after having reentered the event during the last level of late registration. She will battle it out tomorrow with 69,000 chips. Anas Tadini, who reentered a few times today, will also join the party tomorrow for Day 2 with a nice stack of 225,000.
Imad Derwich holds the record of reentries after firing 12 bullets in the event and eventually managed to find a bad at the end of the day with 80,000. Some unfortunate notables who won't make it into Day 2 are Eric Sfez, Cedric Angosto, Jerome Zerbib, Sabrina Derdar and Remi Castaignon.
Here in this Moroccan casino, it is custom that many poker players go solely by their nicknames. So expect them to crop up in the live reporting over the next few days.
All remaining players will return on tomorrow, Saturday September 10th, for Day 2 of the Main Event which will start again at 12 pm local time. The 98 remaining players will return to Level 12 which has a small blind of 1,000, big blind of 2,500 and a running ante of 2,500. The duration of the levels will increase to 60 minutes each.
The schedule, yet to be decided, is set to play until level 22 or 23 tomorrow, with a one 60-minute dinner break and a 15-minute break every two levels.
Come back again tomorrow on to see who will make it into the money and stay in the run for the coveted MPO Main Event title. PokerNews will be here to provide you with all the updates!
, giving a pair of fives on the turn to Mechiche he to eliminate Baumann from the event.
in his hands, was in good shape for a double up, Tadini holding 
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