With a few minutes left in Level 24, Day 1 of the PokerStars 2020 Spring Championship of Online Poker 62-M: $530 NLHE PKO Thursday Thrill SE finished with 190 players making it through to Day 2. The first four and a half hours of the tournament attracted 3,094 entries to the $1,000,000 guarantee to actually end up surpassing it by more than 50% as the total prize pool tallied up to be $1,547,000. 50% of that is dedicated to the bounties which will vary depending on how the players did and will do over these two days. When a new winner has been crowned out of the 431 players who cashed, that person will walk away with at least $95,640 excluding bounties.
Taking the Day 1 chip lead honors is "gnetaren" from Sweden with 4,542,547 in chips. "gnetaren" only jumped into the top ten of the counts during the last hour of the day and ended up on top. they are no stranger to deep runs in tournaments with the PKO-format as they took down the Turbo Series 12: $530 NLHE [6-Max, Progressive KO] back in 2018 for example. Second in the counts is a familiar name: Sven "SvenCalls" McDermott with 4,410,946 in his Day 2 "bag". McDermott scooped a big pot just before the end of the day when he collected the bounties of "marlin5555" and "trisgaudi" when he held pocket jacks. He was up against the ace-king of "marlin5555" and king-queen of "trisgaudi".
Completing the top five on Day 1 are "ddonkat" (4,172,468), "jason13-2008" (4,048,586), and "Nacho124441" (4,009,005). But there are still a bunch of familiar names left amongst the competitors, players like Samuel "€urop€an" Vousden, "O''Pazzzo"", Sean "MonkeyBudg" Prendiville, James "deyrzuited" Noonan, Pavel "silentm0de" Plesuv, Andrey "Anjeyyy" Novak, Fabiano "Kovalski1" Kovalski, Andrey "ThePateychuk" Pateychuk, Luke "Bit2Easy" Reeves, Andrey "kot_spartac" Kotelnikov, Aleksejs "APonakov" Ponakovs, Killian "caaaaamel" Kramer, Joep "Pappe_Ruk" van den Bijgaart, Dimitar "KuuL" Danchev, Michael "munchenHB" Telker, Luan "Pseudo Fruto" Felipe, Pablo "pabritz" Brito, Kelvin "kelvin_fp:ar" Kerber, and Gustavo "22ehnutzz" Mastelotto are just some of the many who are left battling it out in this tournament.
"ezepoker90" was responsible for bursting the bubble when they took out "keepplaya" and doubled through "sp3edy14" with pocket eights while the two others held ace-king. This also signalled the start of a slew of eliminations where players like Adam "adamyid" Owen, Talal "raidalot" Shakerchi, Anatoly "NL_Profit" Filatov, Lucas "YRWTHMELTHR" Greenwood, Connor "blanconegro" Drinan, Mateusz "KeyserMM" Moolhuizen, Simon "C. Darwin2" Mattsson, Joel "Odonkor1" Nordkvist, Mike "SirWatts" Watson, and Alexandru "steakaddict." Papazian all busted in the money.
Lex "L. Veldhuis" Veldhuis finished in 397th place
PokerStars Team Ambassador Lex "L. Veldhuis" Veldhuis finished in seventh place in the SCOOP-57-H: $5,200 NLHE High Roller earlier today and got his last chips in with ace-king when he was looked up by "nakcy" with ace-trey and "duncan1515" with pocket tens. Veldhuis flopped a straight draw but bricked the turn and river to be sent to the rail.
Day 2 resumes at 1 p.m. EST on Friday, May 15 to finish Level 24 which has a small blind of 17,500, big blind of 35,000, and a running ante of 4,500. All players have already been credited with the $912 they have secured for their efforts and will all be eyeing up many more pay jumps towards the final table. Level duration will remain at 20 minutes each with play continuing until one winner walks away with it all.
The PokerNews live reporting team will be on hand to bring you all the live updates so see you again at 1 p.m. EST!
