Second Shot at a Main Event Bag on Friday

Event #12: $2,200 NLH Main Event Day 1B ($1960 + $240)

One flight to the Main Event has already landed with 38 players now waiting on Day 2. 271 entries showed up for the game on Day 1a, and while there have been a couple of Main Event 1a flights that have had larger fields, the higher buy-in this year means it was the highest prize pool for a Day 1a so far, at more than $530k

There are still two more flights to Day 2 taking off, with Day 1b on Friday, and 1c on Saturday. Each later flight is usually 40-50% bigger than the previous one, so that could put the 1b total around 400 entries.

The 1b action runs at 11 am, but players can buy in as late as 8:45 PM. With the 40k starting stack, that still means players entering in Level 12 will start with more than 10 big blinds. Players who buy in during the dinner break following Level 9 come back from dinner with 20 bigs for Level 10.

There are 17 levels on the Day 1 schedule, but the game must play into the money, so the action could run longer if they don’t hit 15% of the field before Level 18. Alternatively, they could bag up early at 10% of the field, but in the Main Event, that rarely happens, so expect this one to finish with more than 10% remaining at the end of Level 17, as was the case with Day 1a.

Oleksii Mezhenkov is the big stack from the opening flight, and Day 1b players have a target of 829k if they want to be the biggest stack on Day 2. One other player bagged in the high 700s from 1a, but most of the 1a players are under 500k going into Day 2.

With the biggest Day 1a prize pool ever, this Main Event is on track to beat the current Main Event prize pool record of $2,234,625 from Jan 2024. The final two days will be the key, but this game is already well on the way to being the biggest ever in Calgary.