Gilles Simon Leads After Day 1a of $3,500 Merit Poker Cup

Day 1a of the $3,500 Merit Poker Cup attracted 159 entries at the inaugural 2026 Merit Poker Noir Series inside the beautiful Merit Royal Diamond Hotel Casino & Spa in Northern Cyprus. After ten 40-minute levels, 86 players secured their place in Day 2, putting the tournament well on its way to surpassing its $1,000,000 guaranteed prize pool.

Topping the counts once the bags were collected was Gilles Simon, who turned his 100,000 starting stack into 557,000, good for more than 200 big blinds on Day 2. Turkey's Atilla Saracoglu sits second with 519,000, while Andras Matrai on 466,500 rounds out the podium positions.

Day 1a Top Ten Chip Counts

Rank	Player	Country	Chip Count	Big Blinds
1	Gilles Simon	Netherlands	557,000	223
2	Atilla Saracoglu	Turkey	519,000	208
3	Andras Matrai	Hungary	466,500	187
4	Sukhrat Massimov	Kazakhstan	448,000	179
5	Nikola Radevic	Slovakia	444,000	178
6	Mehmet Dalkilic	Turkey	435,000	174
7	Mihai Niste	Romania	414,500	166
8	Elie Farah	Lebanon	387,500	155
9	Ryan Mandara	United Kingdom	360,000	144
10	Zoja Fleischer	Germany	345,500	138

Saracoglu found a huge boost to his stack on the penultimate hand of the night after getting all the chips in preflop against Hassan Nashar. With neither player holding a premium hand, Saracoglu's king-nine was ahead of Nashar's jack-deuce and improved to trip nines by the turn to drag a pot worth more than half a million chips. Nashar was eliminated on the following hand, while Saracoglu ended the night among the biggest stacks.

Also advancing to Day 2 was Elie Farah (387,500), the 2024 Merit Poker Carmen Series Main Event champion. Xiaosheng Zheng (232,000), who won the Merit Poker Cup during last year's Dolce Vita Series, also bagged a healthy stack, while Simone Andrian (182,000) wsa the only bracelet winner left in the field after almost doubling the initial starting stack.

Others to advance from Day 1a included Ryan Mandara (360,000), Felipe Ketzer (322,000), Vedat Yilmaz (316,000), and Bogdan Jontulovic (307,500). Konstantin Voronin (290,000), who made a full house to record the tournament's first elimination, also found a bag, while Patrick Brooks (255,000), Raoul Kanme (218,000), Alisa Sibgatova (167,000), and Paul Esau (147,000) all safely navigated the opening flight.

The Merit Poker Cup continues on Wednesday, July 29, with Day 1b, which follows the same structure as the opening flight, kicking off at 12 p.m., before the turbo Day 1c gets underway at 9 p.m. with 25-minute levels. Both flights are the final opportunities to build a big stack for Day 2, and late registration remains open until the start of Level 16. All survivors will return to Level 11 with blinds of 1,000/2,500 and a 2,500 big blind ante.