Day 1 Complete; Bear, West and Junglen Out
by Court on 02.22.09, 3:38 am
After six full levels of play the players have just finished up the 150 / 300 level and completed the first day of play. The action will resume tomorrow at noon with blinds of 200 / 400 with a 50 ante. Late eliminations included Barry “barryg1″ Greenstein, at the hands of Mike “SowersUNCC” Sowers, Adam “A_Junglen” Junglen to fellow PokerVT’er Daniel Negreanu, and Tim “Tmay420″ West (right) fell victim to Mark Newhouse.
West was eliminated in a battle of the blinds with Mark Newhouse. Tim limped the small blind with Q8 and Newhouse checked. On the J-T-9 rainbow board Tim flopped a straight, but when the board paired the 9 on the turn West had a bad feeling about the hand. The rest of his 12k stack to start the hand ended up in the middle though, and his gut feeling turned out to be correct. Newhouse had the T-9 for a full house and busted West from the LAPC. Sowers got the best of Greenstein when his flopped set of jacks left the Bear with nothing to do but sign a copy of his book Ace on the River to give to Sowers after he saw his pocket kings fall.
In one of the larger pots during day 1, Negreanu and Junglen showed that friends off the felt means nothing at the table. Junglen (left) had AQ and flopped top two pair, but Negreanu had the other two queens and flopped a set. All the chips ended up in the middle and there was no miracle ace for Junglen, leaving him out of the tournament and catapulting Negreanu to the chip lead near the end of day 1 with over 115k.
Amit “Amak316″ Makhija was grinding along with 3k for a while after the dinner break, but he was able to rally late and with about 10 minutes left in the day his stack had climbed to around 12k. Full end of day chip counts for the 410 or so remaining players will be available later but it looks like Negreanu, Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, Jeff Madsen, Danny Wong and Phil Ivey will be among those at the top of the leaderboard going into day 2 play.
