Brian Heeb Leads the Overall Field After Day 1b of the 2020 MSPT Venetian $1,100 Main Event
Another 15 full levels were played to their completion on Saturday night in the 2020 Mid-States Poker Tour (MSPT) Venetian $1,100 Main Event, a day where the room was full before the tournament began and remained that way until well after registration closed more than seven hours later. In total, 638 entries were logged to bring the two-day total to 1,123 and generate a massive prize pool of $1,089,310.
When play finished for the day, 84 players remained and Brian Heeb found himself as the man on top of the leader board, finishing play with a massive stack of 786,500. Heeb was spotted with over 500,000 shortly after the last break of the evening and continued to climb as the minutes wound down off the clock until he ended the day with a stack that significantly surpassed Alan Findlay's Day 1a chip lead of 612,500.
Other big stacks included Illinois' Stanley Statkiewicz (411,000), Scott Mobark (376,500), Zachary Reinbold (373,500), and Brandon Lombardo (303,000). Plenty more familiar names to the MSPT and the overall poker world also advanced, including the likes of Blake Whittington (271,000), Ricardo Eyzaguirre (251,500), John Sun (158,500), Nick Pupillo (108,000), and Todd Sladek (102,000).
Many others were less fortunate: Faraz Jaka, Ben Keeline, Rob Wazwaz, Dapo Ajayi, and DJ Buckley were some of those who found the rail prior to the night's completion.
In total, 148 are set to advance to Sunday's Day 2, and those players will come back at 11 a.m. local time to compete for a share of the seven-figure prize pool with the eventual champion set to lock up $201,529 for their weekend's efforts. The top 128 will make it into the money, meaning there is still some work left to be done for all in contention.
PokerNews will be back at it and in for the long haul Sunday morning with updates on all the action. See you then.