Final Flight to the Main Boards on Saturday at Noon

Event #14: $1,100 NLH Main Event ($990 + $110)

Saturday is the final chance to earn a seat in Day 2 of the Main Event on Sunday. The Day 1b action kicks off at noon, and it’s a virtual redo of 1a, but likely with bigger numbers.

Blinds are 40 minutes for Day 1 play, and entries are open for 9 levels. The registration desk for the Main Event will close for good at 7:15 PM on Saturday. After that, they’ll play to 12.5% of the starting field.

There is already more than $95k in the prize pool after 103 entries in the opening flight, and my estimate for 1b is usually at least 50% above 1a. That means we should be looking at a final field above 250, with 300 easily reachable. If 1b gets as few as 147 entries, slightly below my 150% estimate, that will mean 250 total, with $235k in prizes. If the field hits 300, it would be well over $280k for the prize pool.

After the opening day, it’s Kris Steinbach with the big stack of 802k. He got about half of that in the final hand of the night after a huge cooler against Deven Lane. That big stack cooler battle left several short stacks breathing sighs of relief, as they’d been trying to outlast each other for a couple of hours already.

Day 1a played deep into Level 18 before the final hand was dealt. There were multiple opportunities for the night to end earlier, but short stacks refused to lose. In particular, Nick Milkovich was forced all in from the big blind just a few hands before the cooler.

He was blind to his cards through the whole hand, as Kris Steinbach and Matthew Ouellette checked through a full board. Steinbach found a low pair, but as Milkovich finally looked at his hand, he’d paired a nine on the board to more than double his stack. He wasn’t the only one, however — Matthew Ouellette, Murray Hicks, Eric Purdy, and Kyle Bonazzo all managed to find doubles from the short stack to survive.

That makes the 1a stacks a bit lopsided, with 5 players who ended the night on less than 10 big blinds, while the top three have more than 180 big blinds between them. It seems likely Day 1b will end earlier than 1a, meaning the short stacks will get a little deeper with a blind rollback, but anything can happen at the end of a day of MTT poker.

I’ll be a bit late to the floor for this one as Friday night went a bit later than expected, but I should easily be in action before the first break.

Day 1a Stacks