Hendrix, Auer and Qartomy Pace Final 34 in Wynn Main Event
The final 34 contenders have emerged in the Wynn Spring Classic $3,500 Championship, and three players have paced well ahead of the others to position themselves for the best chance at the $391K first-place prize.
Tops in the counts is Adam Hendrix, who looked destined to lap the rest of the field after an incredibly hot start to the day. Hendrix began his rampage a few levels in versus fellow big stack Ben Underwood, when Hendrix made a huge call for stacks with a weak full house — trips were on the board — and was shown a bluff. He then cracked the aces of Matt Bond with a set of eights and was off to the races with 350 big blinds.
Second place is Matthias Auer, who looked set to bag a merely very good stack until the final level of the day, when he got aces over the tens of Qing Liu blind versus blind for a heap to double past 2 million.
Finally, there's Ray Qartomy. The boisterous regular picked up his momentum late as well, gambling with a combo draw on the turn for most of his stack and hitting then having kings hold in a three-way all in that busted high roller star Sergi Reixach and Ryan Remington.
Those three hold a combined 6 million of the 24 million in play with only 300,000 total separating Hendrix from Qartomy.
Others making it through to Day 3 included Chino Rheem, Jeremy Ausmus, Ankush Mandavia, Eric Afriat, Sean Winter and Chris Moorman. They'll be set for a long final day on Monday.
About 200 players — counting late registrations during the first two levels — were in action total, which pushed the prize pool to just shy of $2 million from 614 entries. Some of those getting a slice of that with top-63 finishes were Upeshka De Silva, Matt Stout, Nick Pupillo, Seungmook Jung and recent WPT runner-up Tuan Phan.
Play resumes Monday at noon, so come back to PokerNews then to see who grabs the monster prize awaiting the winner.