Turner Pursues First Bracelet as Trigeorgis Bags the Lead After Day 1 of the $2,500 Mixed Triple Draw
It's been 13 years since Jon Turner notched his first WSOP cash in the $3,000 No-Limit Hold'em event. Turner currently boasts 57 cashes for over $1.2 million but there's one thing that's missing on his stellar CV: the elusive bracelet. He has 14 top 10 finishes to his name including three from the Circuit. Yet he's never made it to the summit.
But Turner is pushing as hard as he can as he demonstrated on Day 1 of the $2,500 Mixed Triple Draw event early on in this year's World Series. Turner navigated through the first 10 hours of play to bag 91,100, putting his name near the top of the leaderboard of the 321-strong field.
With tons of live poker experience in addition to the $8 million he's won in online tournaments, Turner will certainly be one to keep an eye on in the following stage of the tournament.
But there's an exceptionally talented field of just over 90 players who made it through, including two previous champions Chris Vitch and Jesse Martin who will both need to gain some traction early on as they're on the opposite side of the scale, having bagged crumbs.
It appeared to be George Trigeorgis who amassed the biggest stack, with 99,400 in his bag. He will be chased by many accomplished mixed game players such as Brian Hastings (77,600), Billy Baxter (71,900), Jameson Painter (61,200), James Obst (60,100), Scott Seiver (58,600), Ashton Griffin (52,400), John Monnette (49,800) and many others.
The third edition of the Mixed Triple Draw generated the largest turnout with 321 entries. The number has been inflated by the newly-established single reentry option whereas previous years have been played in the traditional freezeout format.
Two more days still remain before the name of the 2018 champion is discovered, but one thing is already set in stone: the winner will take home $180,455 and, of course, the gold.
Half of the remaining field is still destined to walk away empty-handed with 49 positions paid. Day 1 casualties who are no longer involved in the battles for the $722,250 prize pool included some of the biggest names imaginable, including Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu.
Ivey jumped into the tournament in the last minute of registration and it didn't take him long to get his chips flying around. He was downed to just 100 at one point to mount a comeback to 6,000 through a streak of doubles only to finally lose his stack in the following minutes. Benny Glaser, Dzmitry Urbanovich and Daniel Sterlitz were also eliminated from contention, to name a few unfortunate faces.
Day 2 kicks off Sunday, June 3 at 2 p.m. with the blinds of 600/1,200 and 1,200/2,400 bets. The PokerNews live reporting team will be on the ground to provide live updates so make sure you'll come back to follow the coverage.