Day 2c, the last of the separate fields competing in the $10,000 buy-in World Series of Poker main event, is in the record books, with top international online and live tourney poker pro Phil Ivey holding the chip lead ahead of 1,864 survivors of the various entry flights to the event, in which 6,683 players registered and started competing last weekend.
Ivey delivered a great performance on Wednesday, starting the day among the big stacks and motoring through the pack to build up a stack of over half-a-million chips by the end of the day, positioning himself strongly for today’s action, in which the survivors of Day 2a-b and 2c will come together in a combined field for the first time and the cash bubble should come into sight.
The prize pool for this year’s main event is $62,820,200, which means that the lowest pay-outs will be around $18,406, whilst most final tablers will earn seven figure prizes.
Ivey is no stranger to the WSOP main event; in 2009 he made seventh on the final table and won almost $1.5 million. This year he claimed his tenth WSOP winner’s bracelet in one of the preliminary events (see previous report).
Among the notable names who have made it through Day 2c are Isaac Baron, Brian Townsend, John Hennigan, Martin Jacobson, Antonio Esfandiari, Abe Mosseri, Mukul Pahuja, former champ Chris Moneymaker, Daniel Alaei, Tom Marchese, Greg Mueller and Jeff Madsen.
With them are NBA sportsman Paul Pierce and quality players like Maria Ho, former champ Johnny Chan, John Monnette and Gavin Smith, albeit with considerably lower stacks.
Ivey’s closest rival is Tim Stansifer, who was the top stack on Day 2a-b and is now on 481,500 chips and breathing down Ivey’s neck.
Many players, including some big names and former WSOP champions, were not sufficiently fortunate to last the day, and the main event said goodbye to Phil Hellmuth, champs Joe Cada, Jonathan Duhamel and Joe Hachem, Berry Johnston, Carlos Mortensen and Scotty Nguyen.
Robert Varkonyi and defending champion Ryan Riess are still alive, along with last year’s November Niners Jay Farber and Mark Newhouse.