Kaiser Reigns After Day 2 of the €10K High Roller in Barcelona
A 10-hour Day 2 in the €10,300 PokerStars Championship Barcelona High Roller saw a field of 266 hopefuls being whittled down to just 34. Although everyone already has a sweet payday of €25,380 locked up, each of them still has a shot at the massive first-place prize of €1,036,800 that awaits the victor on Sunday night.
In an exceptionally strong field, it was EPT8 Tallinn champion Ronny Kaiser who bagged the overall chip lead with 2,696,000. After grabbing the chip lead earlier in the day, Kaiser applied a lot of pressure in the bubble phase to build his stack out even more. After cracking pocket jacks with pocket eights, the Swiss grabbed never looked back. In the last level of the night, Kaiser spun it up even further to end the day with a substantial lead over his nearest challengers.
Rounding out the top five are Luis Rodriguez Cruz (1,893,000), Boris Kolev (1,370,000), Parker Talbot (1,358,000) and recent WSOP Main Event final table participant Benjamin Pollak (1,353,000). Notables still in contention are Conor Beresford (1,033,000), JC Alvarado (840,000), Christoph Vogelsang (739,000), Sam Grafton (658,000) and Christopher Kruk (510,000), although nearly everyone left at this point could be considered a notable in this stacked field.
Team PokerStars Pro Jake Cody will be the sole representative of the red spade on the final day. The Brit bagged 1,080,000 and sits in 10th place after two days. His teammates Bertrand Grospellier, Felipe Ramos and Jeff Gross all busted in the early stages of Day 2 and went home empty-handed.
The same fate befell Robert Mizrachi, Kitty Kuo, Isaac Haxton, Byron Kaverman, and Anton Wigg.
The bubble phase lasted more than an hour, and the dubious honor of eventual bubble boy went to Raul Martinez. After seeing multiple people double up already, Martinez went for it with ace-queen suited after Markus Durnegger had raised early. Durnegger held ace-king and won to secure all players of at least €18,400.
Once in the money, Govert Metaal, Benny Spindler, Ben Tollerene, Andrew Chen, Philipp Gruissem, Marc-Andre Ladouceur, John Juanda, Jasper Meijer van Putten, Ari Engel, Julian Stuer and Steve O'Dwyer all added another money finish to their already impressive poker resumés. Kyle Bowker became the latest casualty of the day and received €25,380, while the remaining 34 bagged up their chips shortly after.
Sunday at 12:30 p.m. local time, the third and final day will kick off. With levels scheduled at 60 minutes for the remainder of the tournament, an ultra-long day is to be expected, although level time might be shortened later during the day by tournament director's discretion. Play will resume in Level 21 with blinds at 10,000/20,000 and a running ante of 3,000.
Follow PokerNews throughout the day for updates on this gigantic event, that will make one player a millionaire on Sunday night.
A former professional poker player with a background in sports marketing and journalism. Yori has been a part of PokerNews since 2016 and manages the content team.
