As was expected, Day 1b of the HKD 100,000 Short Deck Ante-Only brought a stronger turnout with a total of 42 entries reported by the end of the registration period. The stacked field featured two of the most phenomenal players in the world as Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan both entered in the latter half of today's play.
Neither one would eventually make it through as they couldn't gain much traction during their short stint at the tables. Ivey's bid for his second short deck title – he topped the HKD 250k edition at Triton Montenegro – was dismissed by Siow Choon Tong. Ivey got it in good with ace-queen against queen-jack but two jacks on the board sealed his fate in the seventh level.
Dwan lasted a little longer but his final showdown came in level 9 when he wasn't able to get there with ten-seven versus the jack-nine of Ivan Leow.
The two biggest superstars were eliminated but there's still a tough competition coming back for Day 2. Wai Kin Yong has been arguably the most impressive player in the field so far and he happens to be the chip leader after crushing the second flight in a spectacular fashion. Yong kept increasing his stack by an order of magnitude. He eventually finished with 3,380,000, getting himself a big cushion ahead of his nearest rivals.
Yong already competed on Day 1a and showcased some fine aggression. While it didn't work out for him on Monday, Yong capitalized on his style today. His rise to the top started when he scooped a three-way contest with ten-nine against two ace-queens to cross 660,000 in the third level.
What followed next was a bull rush. Yong never seemed to be willing to back off from any major clash. He was winning most of the big pots, having clipped the likes of Ivey and Mikita Badziakouski. On one of the final days of the day, Yong picked off Rui Cao's bluff with a top pair and cemented his huge lead.
Leow amassed the second-biggest stack with 2,320,000, sitting more than 1 million behind the leader. Only two other players managed to accumulate more than 1 million; Foo Sze Ming (1,595,000) and Ben Lamb (1,030,000).
Lamb suffered heaps of bad runouts on Day 1a but he finally synchronized with the boards today. The most important hand that helped him push his stack to the top five emerged in the last level when he open-shoved with ace-king under the gun. Badziakouski accepted the challenge with pocket jacks and they flipped for a million in chips. Lamb caught what he needed to finish Badziakouski off.
Day 2 will see some more high stakes crushers back in action along with Lamb: Nick Schulman and Stephen Chidwick both navigated their stacks through. They will return Wednesday, July 25 at 2 p.m. for the finale as the remaining 16 players (from a 61-entry field) will be battling for more than HKD 6 million in prizes. The top seven finishers will be rewarded with the eventual champ taking home HKD 2,135,000 (just over $270,000). Come back to PokerNews then to follow the climax of the opening event at 2018 Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju.
Tom Dwan clashed with Ivan Leow in a hand that saw Leow turn up and Dwan the .
Dwan was a slight underdog and he couldn't improve as he played the board with the middle of the table featuring the community cards. Leow finished with a full house and ended Dwan's brief appearance in the short deck event.
Marius Torbergesen limped in from under the gun and action folded to Tom Dwan who moved all in. Action folded back to Torbergesen and he called quickly.
Tom Dwan:
Marius Torbergesen:
The board came down and that gave Dwan two pair, allowing him to double up to over 400,000 while Torbergesen was cut down to around 500,000.
Siow Choon Tong moved all in for 175,000 and Cheong Cheok Ieng moved all in over the top for about 575,000. Nick Schulman then called both shoves with a covering stack and it was off to the races.
Nick Schulman:
Siow Choon Tong:
Cheong Cheok Ieng:
The board came down and that gave Tong a full house to triple up. Cheong with the shorter stack than Schulman was eliminated in the process, allowing Schulman to pick up about 400,000 chips in a side pot
After three limps, Phil Ivey moved all in for around 250,000 and action folded to Siow Choon Tong called while everyone else folded.
Phil Ivey:
Siow Choon Tong:
The bord ran out and Tong made a full house to send Ivey to the rail. It didn't appear as if he was going to rebuy for this event as he headed out of the tournament area. With his elimination, a new player will be crowned the short deck warm-up champion.
After a couple of limps, including one from Paul Phua, Wai Kin Yong raised, making it 481,000. Next to act was Mikita Badziakouski moved all in for about 380,000. Action folded back to Phua who tanked for a good while before folding.
Wai Kin Yong:
Mikita Badziakouski:
"Oh!" Phua said. "Good fold!"
"What did you have," Badziakouski asked.
"Queen-ten suited," Phua responded.
It was good news for Badziakouski as Yong had less outs, but the board ran out giving Yong a full house anyways and allowing him to scoop another pot to add to his already massive stack.
Badziakouski appears to have used all three bullets up front for a chance to double for more, but now returns to the registration desk to buy in once more.
2018 Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju kicked off yesterday in the Landing Casino with 19 registrations made to the opening flight of the HKD 100k Short Deck Ante-Only event. Nine levels of play saw four players survive as Chow Hing Yaung, Alan Sass, Gabe Patgorski and Kenneth Kee have all punched their tickets for Day 2.
Today will see more players join them as Day 1b gets underway at 4 p.m. local time. Players such as Ben Lamb, Stephen Chidwick, Mikita Badziakouski or Wai Yong will have another opportunity to pursue their first short deck success after falling short yesterday.
But the gates remain open for anyone, be it players who just arrived in Jeju or those who have already made it through to try to amass a bigger stack. It's hard to expect Chow and Sass return to the felt as they've already sealed almost 2 million in their bags. But Patgorski told PokerNews yesterday that he's considering to fire another entry to see whether he could improve his position ahead of Day 2.
"I might also play tomorrow," Patgorski said.
With deuces, treys, fours and fives removed from the deck, the game creates situations that are yet to be thoroughly explored and solved by the no-limit wizards. The short deck rules generally encourage an aggressive approach and the format implemented here in the HKD 100k event even emphasizes the fast-paced, high-variance action. All players receive three stacks of 100,000 apiece and each bullet can be added to a stack before any given hand.
The player on the button posts a double ante and acts last on each betting round. With nine 30-minute levels and a 30-second shot clock installed for Day 1, the action proved to have a brilliant game-flow in the first starting flight. We're about to find out what Day 1b has in store for the high stakes poker fans around the world, so come back to PokerNews to follow the live updates from the second starting flight.
Over the course of the last couple years, Lex Veldhuis has been building his presence as one of the biggest and best streamers in the poker world. He's now starting to expand his presence even further by delving into the world of commentary, and he's taking a big step by hopping into the booth here in Jeju, commentating alongside Randy Lew. While this isn't Lew's first experience with Triton and short deck, it is a crash course of sorts for Veldhuis, who is picking up the game quickly.
"I kind of feel like it's a good balance if you don't overdo it," Veldhuis said about his preparation for the event. "But I think that coming in unprepared is kind of unprofessional. I think that a lot of the audience is learning. I know Randy has more experience so I thought about positioning myself in a way where I want to know the rules. I want to know enough where it triggers some kind of interesting strategy because then you're going to come up with questions right. And if I voice those questions and ask them out loud, and also to Randy on the stream, then you get like an interesting discussion going and hopefully, I will ask some of the questions that the chat is having themselves. So I think that that will create the most interesting dynamic in learning a new game."
Veldhuis hadn't played the game before himself, so in preparation, he watched streams from the previous event in Montenegro and gave himself a refresher course on the rules of the game. But the game is intriguing to Veldhuis who said it reminds him of pot-limit Omaha, a game that he loves. And while Veldhuis said that broadcasting and commentating gives him the itch to play, this line of work is more in line with his goals at the moment.
"I mean it even happens if I'm just watching it on Twitch or from watching YouTube video," Veldhuis explained about his itch to play. "There's always an itch. I know to feel the way it feels to play those games which is always awesome. I love the tension of high stakes poker and I just like competing a lot. So there's always and itch to play. "
Randy Lew - Lex Veldhuis
"People ask me a lot 'Why don't you play the event if you're there? Why don't you play?' I mean obviously, I'm not going to play million dollar buy-in. It's not like, you know, oh let's do this on a random Tuesday or something. What's really important for me, when I think about my career as something that I'm building, is does it support what I'm doing right now. And at this moment broadcasting supports what's in line with my goals. It supports what I want to do right now and it supports what I'm building. So it's a very easy choice for me to choose broadcasting. Because broadcasting ties in with Twitch, it ties in with my platform and everything else. But the itch is always there."
And for Veldhuis the two jobs do go hand in hand. While the commentary work is quite different from streaming his own content, they both build on each other in complementary ways.
"I think that the biggest thing is just getting used to talking," he explained. "I've really noticed that I've gotten better at talking, picking my words, like kind of going through sentences and stuff. And of course a lot of media stuff that I've done over the past years have helped with that as well. But I mean just to illustrate, a funny comment somebody made in my Twitch channel was, 'Do you realize that English is your first language now?' I talk more English than I do Dutch because it's just nonstop talking. So that really helps. You also kind of learn what people think is interesting. You get a better gauge of humor, points of interest, that sort of thing so I think it prepares you very really well."
The differences lie in the analysis portion for Veldhuis. While streaming he is more focused on analyzing his own play and creating his own content when commentating, he's in the service of someone else's content.
"I feel like I'm developing a different side of something that I'm already interested in and already building," he said. "t's a potential future for me."
And for Veldhuis, the commentating also works as a learning tool as well by forcing him into a position where he has to analyze and go over every hand played.
"Now I'm aware of my active duty to kind of find tendencies you know," he said. "So I see things that people do a lot, really spotting tendencies. So everybody really seems to just always call in early position when nine-eight suited. That's just the way people play their hands. Cool so that should become your new standard. Right? A lot of people that have played this game a lot do a certain things and that's a really good starting point."
Along with that, Veldhuis is picking up on what players understand the game the best. After the first day of play, he noted tendencies of Gabe Patgorski, Kenneth Kee, and Chow Hing Yuang.
Gabe Patgorski
"I picked up that the Patgorski played this a lot," Veldhuis said. "He plays high stakes cash games, high stakes tournament short deck. So he's played this lot. So I'm going to go with what he does as a really good example of somebody that kinda plays above the rim that does really good stuff. And obviously he's very spewy sometimes and very aggressive but it could tie in to a very good style in short deck.
"I really like the way Kee's playing," he continued. "Because he played some interesting hands today but he seems to be very good at staying out of pots. I also thought Yuang was playing really well. He seems to be very good at hand reading. He seemed a little bit over it at the end of the day. But before that he was showing some really, really good strategy. He was very sharp. He really didn't fall into a lot of traps. I think he understands the preflop game really well."
Chow Hing Yaung
When it comes to strategy and things Veldhuis saw and liked, it was all about preflop play. He explained that for him, there was a lot of really ill-advised limping going on, and not enough three-betting.
"I think the limping is a huge part. There's one thing that I feel like people haven't really... One thing that was highlighted to me was something that I'm missing. I feel like there's kind of a big hole and people aren't really used to what they should reraise and three-bet with. They know what they should go all in with approximately, and what they should call was kind of, but it really seems there that all the hands you could think of three-bet bluffing with people are picking to flat call with. So there is a lot of limping, a lot of calling, not much raising and three betting yet.
"You know it's a tournament it's not cash game. So if you play a really good PLO tournament game you see people limp a lot. You see people going to the flops and it turns into a flop game a lot. So that's kind of the thing I do take away from it is that you just complete a lot because you have to pay one ante. You get like seven to one right off the bat. First player gets seven to one on his hand. You have ten-eight, ten-eight can do a lot of stuff you know. So I think it's very table dependent."
"I do think that we see a lot of to lose limps to be honest," Veldhuis continued. "Queen-six, king-six, jack-six, jack-seven. I don't think you're really supposed to seeing those hands. I think it's kind of like the illusion of pot odds. 'I get a good odds, so I call,' but it never works out because your hand is shit. You know? So what are you really calling for?"
The game of short deck hold'em is still not globally renowned and is still growing, just recently moving onto the scene of streamed poker events. According to Veldhuis, the best way to grow the game is by sharing it with friends and playing smaller buy-ins together to get a feel for the game and to spread the good word.
"I think the best thing to do is to tell your friends about it," he said. "If you play drinking games or you know, if you go to a bar... Me and my friends play games the bar all the time. Actually, you know, my friends in real life, they play like 20 euro buy-in games every week at our favorite pub and they asked me one time so I kind of explained Omaha to them and we would play like 20 dollar Omaha sit and go's. That's probably the best way to do it. You look up the rules, you start playing with your friends and it's really good to learn games that way. I don't think it's offered anywhere online at this moment so that's kind of what you are going to have to stick to. Or you know buy-in for twelve and a half thousand dollars in a warm-up event."
Veldhuis said it's only a matter of time until the game is seen on a bigger scale, predicting that by next year a World Series of Poker short deck event could be within reach.
"I think that it's picked up really well," Veldhuis said. "I think people like watching it. People Like playing it. I'm getting actually, especially after Montenegro Triton event, people are asking me a lot on Twitch, 'Are you going to play short deck?' I can't. I think it's really up to people there. You know there's such a competitive atmosphere out there. I think that people are going to try and jump on it to offer it to be the first one to offer it so people can play somewhere. I mean I think it's going to be really soon when we see somewhere live and somewhere else."
and Dwan the 
. 
community cards. Leow finished with a full house and ended Dwan's brief appearance in the short deck event.
and that gave Dwan two pair, allowing him to double up to over 400,000 while Torbergesen was cut down to around 500,000.
and Tong made a full house to send Ivey to the rail. It didn't appear as if he was going to rebuy for this event as he headed out of the tournament area. With his elimination, a new player will be crowned the short deck warm-up champion.
