After battling through sickness to get through Day 1 of the Main Event, Garrett “GBecks” Beckman (pictured left) is feeling way better on Day 2b
Beckman’s change of mood isn’t necessarily because the remnants of what he suspected was food poisoning is gone, although that definitely helps, but that his stack has gone from 54k to start the day to over 220k by the dinner break.

Beckman won a 160k pot earlier in the day when he opened for 2k and got re-raised to 7k. Beckman re-raised to 27k and his opponent called. First to act, Beckman checked a 10-10-7 flop and his opponent checked. Beckman checked when another 7 peeled on the turn and his opponent went all-in for 60k. Beckman called with queens and his opponents’ AK didn’t improve.
“It was pretty hard to check twice,” Beckman said.

Mohsin “chicagocards1″ Charania was pleased to make the dinner break after going through what he described as maybe the worst level of his life. Charania started with 108k and went down to 12k only to rebound to 63k by the break. Playing alongside Charania was Aditya “intervention” Agarwal, who hit the break with 150k. Despite having a healthy stack, Agarwal is still remembering the 85k pot he lost when his pocket sevens connected to the 8-7-2 board and his opponents pocket nines turned a set to trump Agarwal’s set of sevens in a hand where his opponent was all-in on the flop.

Aaron “NDGrinder59″ Steury has been steadily building his stack all day long, but he made a huge jump up the chip counts before the break when he got it all-in in a blind versus blind confrontation holding pocket queens to his opponent’s A-K. Steury managed to win the classic race situation when the board came ten high and Aaron increased his chip stack to 250K.

Tony “Bond18″ Dunst remained on life-support before the dinner break, which he planned to spend at the Rio’s Indian restaurant. PocketFives caught up with Tony in the big blind, checking on a flop of AK9. When the small blind raised to 5.5K, Tony folded and called the table a “total fiasco” - he was barely treading water as Jean-Robert Bellande a few seats to his left kept chipping up. He couldn’t manage to catch any action on his small blind either; he completed and folded to a late raise. However, on the button, he shoved all in for his remaining 8.5K and the table folded to him. Bellande joked, “You’re the survivor here, kid. You’re the survivor.” He chipped up to a whopping 10.5K before dinner break.

Senovio “Dorsal Fin” Ramirez doubled up to 58K when he and another player got all of their chips in on a king-high flop — Ramirez with pocket aces and his opponent with ace-king. Here’s a look at some other chip counts as players went into the dinner break:

Tom “titantom32″ Braband - 224K
Brandon Schaefer - 140K
Jon “pokertrip” Friedberg - 110k
David “davidp18″ Peters - 109k
“BodogAri” Engel - 70K
Eric “basebaldy” Baldwin - 50k
Tracey “xtrACEy” Nguyen - 46K
Ryan “Daut44″ Daut - 41k
Adam “Roothlus” Levy - 30k
Devin “TranquilChaos” Porter - 37K

• July 10, 2008 -- Levy’s Ruthless Pursuit of Chips
• July 9, 2008 -- Divine Intervention
• July 12, 2008 -- Double Trouble
• July 6, 2008 -- BadBeatNinja Disappears Into the Night