Big Stacks Building

A few big stacks are beginning to emerge now the players are finding their groove. One of these is Jeho Lee and we caught the tail end of a big pot that saw the Korean player climb close to the top of the leaderboard.

We missed the pre-flop action but were informed by Chile's Francesco Morales that it was a three-bet pre-flop pot. By the time we arrived there was close to 23,000 in the pot with the community cards spread face up on the felt and action was on Lee, who was the player in position in the hand.

Lee pulled the trigger for everything in front of him, shoving for 30,000 in total to send his opponent, sitting in the big blind, deep into the think tank, where she remained for several minutes. Eventually, a decision was reached and the call was made.

Lee turned over for the rivered backdoor runner, runner straight, something his opponent looked deeply unhappy about and she headed for the rail while Lee raked in his ill-gotten gains to climb to 73,000.

While Lee now has a healthy stack the honor of the chip lead belongs to Hong Kong's Darwin Lai, whom we caught in action in a hand against China's Jason Shao.

The action was all decided pre-flop, but it was a tense standoff that took several minutes to play out to say that no flop was dealt. It was Shao who was the initial aggressor, making it 800 to go from under-the-gun. Action folded around to Lai on the button and he popped it up to 2,000.

Shao responded with a four-bet to 11,000 and action was back on Lai. While he took his time over the decision Lai's response was forceful and the Hong Kong player moved all-in, having Shao covered by quite some margin. After several minutes agonizing over his decision, Shao opted to pick a better spot and pitched his cards into the muck to drop down to 10,000.

Lai did not show, but seemed happy enough to scoop the pot and climbed to 88,000 after the hand, making him the current frontrunner.