Yesterday’s final starting flight for the $26K WSOP Super Main Event wasn’t quite the last opportunity to grab a seat – registration will remain open for a few levels of today’s Day 2. But with the blinds on Day 2 starting at 10K/25K, Day 1d did provide a chance to play some deep-stacked poker and run it up to a big stack, ready to do battle on Monday. For those members of Paradise Island’s poker-playing community without a seat for Day 2, then, Sunday was not a day of rest.
Day 1d was the only tournament game in town yesterday, so if you already had a Day 2 seat locked up, it was time to take stock, recharge your batteries and hit the waterslides. Or, you know, play cash games.
Souls of discretion, us PokerOrg reporters gave the players in the cash game area the privacy they wanted, but that’s not how it went down in the tournament room. Plenty of big names were out in force, taking their first shot, taking their last shot, doing whatever they could to find a bag in this incredible event, and we were right there to take it all in and report the juiciest moments on our Instant Live page.
Overlay watch
We first learned of the $50 million guarantee for this one in July, and have wondered ever since if it was possible to hit such an ambitious target. 2,000 players at $25K a pop would hit the guarantee, and with all live Day 1s done and dusted, here’s how the numbers are looking, courtesy of the WSOP:
- Day 1a: 461
- Day 1b: 254
- Day 1c: 181
- Day 1d: 228
- Total: 1,124
Registration is open for a few levels once Day 2 begins later today and online Day 1 qualifiers will be joining on Day 3. 387 players have made Day 2 via live Day 1s. Even factoring in the live stragglers and tomorrow’s arrivals from the online Day 1s, that’s likely to be a very manageable field considering it’s a shot at the biggest guaranteed prize pool in live poker history. Could the WSOP have a few final tricks up its sleeve to avoid what could be the biggest overlay in live poker history? We’ll keep them peeled, but if ever late registration looked more attractive than now, we can’t remember it.
If this article breaks off abruptly, it will be because I somehow scrabbled together the entry fee*. Day 2 starts at noon, there’s no time to lose.
All-time money boss Bryn bags big
This is Bryn Kenney. You may recognize him from such enormous tournament results as $20.5M (Triton Million, 2019), $6.8M (Triton Super High Roller, 2023), and of course who can forget $4.4M (Triton Monte Carlo, last month).
If tournament winnings are your yard-stick, Kenney is the best there is. His $73M+ in career earnings puts him comfortably at the #1 spot in the all-time money list, almost $9M ahead of #2, Justin Bonomo.
Where there’s a prize pool this size, Kenney will not be far away, and so it is that the New Yorker finds himself at the Atlantis Resort, a lethal shark let loose in the Caribbean. Kenney turned it on during yesterday’s Day 1d, ending up with 3.6M chips, good for a top 3 stack behind just Eric Yanovsky (3.9M) and Mikhail Iakovlev (3.8M).
The eye-watering prize pool also drew a number of faces we’ve not seen at the tables for a while, including former PokerStars pros Liv Boeree and Vanessa Selbst. Both have major poker accomplishments under their belt, both have re-focused on other pursuits in recent years, and both were back for this big one, hunting a bag for Day 2 and a shot at the millions up top. Boeree will bring 1.3M chips into Day 2, Selbst wasn’t so lucky. Perhaps she’ll stick around for tomorrow’s High Roller or take another shot by max-late-regging Day 2?
The ‘I didn’t just flop a set’ face, as performed by Vanessa Selbst.
Among those joining Kenney and Boeree in putting chips in bags at the end of the day were the likes of Jesse Lonis, Jason Mercier, Alex Botez and ‘Wolfgang’ Seibt of the USA, the UK’s John Duthie, Jack Salter and Roberto Romanello, and Canada’s Timothy Adams, Sam Greenwood and Pascal Lefrancois.
Check the chip counts tab in the PokerOrg Instant Live feed and you’ll see an absolute festival of flags representing players from all over the world. Whether or not this event meets its guarantee, it’s successfully brought together the world’s top players from right across the globe.
Heading into Day 2, here are the top 10 chip counts from the combined field.
| Place | Player | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fedor Holz | 4,880,000 |
| 2 | Juan Pardo | 4,585,000 |
| 3 | Jonathan Jaffe | 4,390,000 |
| 4 | Eric Yanovsky | 3,995,000 |
| 5 | Shaun Deeb | 3,960,000 |
| 6 | Kayhan Mokri | 3,805,000 |
| 7 | Mikhail Iakovlev | 3,800,000 |
| 8 | Bryn Kenney | 3,615,000 |
| 9 | Igor Picone | 3,520,000 |
| 10 | Pascal Lefrancois | 3,520,000 |
What else is happening?
The PokerOrg crew have boots on the ground and are sniffing out the best stories from the tournament floor. And speaking of sniffing, there’s definitely something in the air in The Bahamas right now…
And some of the WSOP’s biggest winners ever are back, looking for more.
Stick with PokerOrg and our Instant Live WSOP Paradise page for the best stories and content from The Bahamas. And if that’s all too quick and easy, you can get comfy and watch the full stream from yesterday’s Day 1d below.
Additional images courtesy of WSOP
*(I’m still here – turns out there was no $26K in my advent calendar this morning)