Davidi Kitai In Control Of Event #42
A crowd of 452 players made their way to the Brasilia Room today for the $5,000 Six-Handed Pot-Limit Omaha event, and by the time 10 hour-long levels were completed only 96 of them had chips that needed bagging and tagging.
Some of those 96 survivors bagged up only a few big blinds, while others had to cram masses of chips into their overnight sacks.
One such big stack, the biggest stack in the room in fact, belongs to Belgium's Davidi Kitai, who turned his 15,000 starting stack into a colossal pile worth 308,300. Kitai won his third World Series of Poker gold bracelet this year and now looks set to make a run for a fourth if his Day 1 form is anything to go by.
Other players who had a great day at the felt were Brandon Crawford (202,900), recent bracelet winner Kory Kilpatrick (202,000), Brant Hale (189,200), and Mike Gorodinsky (186,600).
As you would expect from a tournament that costs the princely sum of $5,000 to enter, plenty of notable players punched their ticket for Day 2's action.
Players such as Brian Rast (147,900), Mike Watson (135,700), Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi (119,200), Scotty Nguyen (108,500), David "Bakes" Baker (108,200), Ashton Griffin (103,400), Phil Galfond (72,100), JC Tran (66,000), Jason Mercier (62,900), Calvin Anderson (48,900), and Sorel Mizzi (44,300) being a small but stellar selection of top talent to look out for when the tournament resumes.
Speaking of which, Day 2 commences at 1 p.m. local time on Saturday, and the plan is to play 10 hour-long levels and whittle the field down as close to the final table of six as possible. While the final table almost certainly won't be reached, the money places will be as they start at 48th place.
Keep your browsers locked to PokerNews to keep up to date with all of the action, as it happens, from this superb action-packed tournament.