Brian Rast Leads 39 Players to Day 2 in National Championship
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After a full year in the making Day 1 of the WSOP National Championship has come to a close. Almost all of the 100 WSOPC qualifiers showed up to play and 57 WSOP POY qualifiers forked over the $10,000 entrance fee to play. Leading the remaining 39 players is Brian Rast with 248,000.
On Rast’s heels are Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier (231,500) and Matt Keikoan (228,500). Notables David “ODB” Baker, Eugene Katchalov, Sam Stein, Fabrice Soulier, Chris Tryba and Chris Moorman still remain.
WSOPC standouts Drazen Ilich, Aaron Massey, Amanda Musumeci, Ryan Eriquezzo, Chris Conrad, Jamie Kerstetter, Huy Nguyen and Jacob Naquin remain in the field. Only two WSOPC Main Event champions remain – Eriquezzo and Jerry Monroe.
A total of 19 tables began play and eliminations were swift throughout the day. By the dinner break that number had been halved and by night’s end only five tables remained.
Plenty of notables that paid $10,000 did not survive the day including; Michael Mizrachi, Tristan Wade, David “Doc” Sands, Jeffrey Papola, Pius Heinz, Christian Harder, John Racener, Matt Glantz, Allen Bari and Phil Hellmuth.
Some of the WSOPC qualifiers that didn’t survive the day included; Freddy Deeb, Alex Masek, Kurt Jewell, Tripp Kirk, Kyle Cartwright, AP Phahurat, Tuan Phan, Drew Dumanski, Daniel Lowery, Raj Kattamuri, Charles Moore and Jennifer Parrish.
The structure has been kept the same as WSOPC Main Events with 40-minute levels on Day 1 and levels bump up to 60 minutes during Day 2. The third and final day of play will have 75-minute levels.
Day 2 will resume at 1 p.m. PST in the Gold Section of the Brasilia Room. The field will play down to a final table of eight players. Follow all the WSOP National Championship action live on PokerNews.com.
. Papola checked to Rast, who fired out 2,475. Papola called, and the turn came the 
. Papola checked again, and Rast kept up his aggression, firing 5,100. Papola folded his cards, and Rast took the pot, upping his stack to 70,000.
, and it was checked over to Matros, who fired out 1,600. Bolden called, and Rast kicked his cards in. Shortly after, Rast sneezed a couple times, and took a swig from his water bottle. Matros and Bolden went on to play a big pot, and we will post about that shortly.
