Brink Bags Lead After Day 1a of $370 Opening Event
Day 1a of the $370 Opening Event in the Potomac Poker Open gathered a total of 344 entries and at the end of a long day of play, just 28 remained who will advance to Day 2 on Sunday. From the beginning the plan was to play down till 8% remained and it took close to 12 hours for 92% of the field to be sent to the rail.
At the end of the action it was Alex Brink who led the way with 658,000 in chips, more than 25 times the staring stack of 25,000. He was spotted late in the day with massive double stacks of chips to create a fortress. Brink could have had potentially even more as a huge hand arose late in the night with three players all in ahead of him, but he decided to lay it down after thinking it over for a while. The beneficiary of that three-way all in way was Charles Gang as his pocket aces held and he close to tripled his stack and launched him to end the day in 2nd place by bagging 619,000.
Also among the larger stacks to advance to Day 2 was Skender Alicka with 605,000. He also gathered a large amount of his stack in a double elimination when his hand held as the favorite from pre-flop through the river. Dean Chen (591,000), who had a large stack early in the day but lost a good amount of it before building it back up and Christopher Pham Le (563,000) round out the top five largest stacks.
Another player who bagged for the night was Renn Pfeiffer who was among the chip leaders for most of the day, but fell back slightly in the final couple of levels of play as she finished with 326,000. Other players advancing to Day 2 include JJ Gruden (379,000), Tao Chen (229,000) and Bill Thomas (113,000)
The day was packed with a lot of action, culminating in the bubble bursting with 41 players left and played down until action was halted at the discretion of the tournament director at the conclusion level 20, which was just one player shy of the original goal of playing down to 27.
The 28 who survived the day will return at 12 p.m. local time on Sunday July 28, to join the survivors of the next four flights of play.