Nick Petrangelo Leads After Day 1 of the HK$103,000 High Roller in Macau
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The High Roller tournaments at the 2017 PokerStars Championship Macau have seen strong turnouts across the board at the PokerStars Live Macau poker room at City of Dreams and today was no different, as 134 unique players took part on Day 1 of the HK$103,000 High Roller. On top of that, 39 of the participants opted to take advantage of the single re-entry option to create a field of 174 entries thus far.
After ten levels of 60 minutes each, only 78 players bagged up chips, including 17 of the hopefuls that re-entered, and it was Nick Petrangelo who won a close race at the top and accumulated 274,000. The American poker pro, who already has two second-place finishes in High Roller tournaments at the festival here in Macau for a combined score of more than $500,000, is closely followed by China's Xiaoyang Luo (266,800) and Yang Wang (264,000). Live Satellite winner Neel Murthy turned a starting stack of 50,000 into 259,400 and Troy Quenneville rounds up the top five overnight with 239,200.
Other big stacks and notables include Michael Addamo (220,000), Paul-Francois Tedeschi (216,100), Raghav Bansal (205,700), Sofia Lovgren (193,100), Daniel Dvoress (192,300), Dan Smith (182,100), Sergey Lebedev (181,200), two-time Red Dragon champion Tom Alner (148,100), Vladimir Troyanovskiy (139,700), HK$400,000 Super High Roller champion Steve O'Dwyer (116,000), David Peters (115,700), and John Juanda (114,100).
Three pros represented the red spade and made it through to Day 2: Felipe Ramos, who finished third in yesterday's HK$82,400 Pot-Limit Omaha High Roller, claimed 85,000 and will be joined on Day 2 by fellow PokerStars Team Pro Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier (51,000) and Team Online's Randy Lew (23,700).
The day started with some 50 players in their seats soon after the start, and the field soon climbed above 100 unique entries with many familiar faces of the international circuit and local poker aficionados alike joining in on the action. By the time level three was completed, Stevan Chew had re-entered and busted in the second attempt as well, while Yang Wang had tripled up his stack already. Yang was the most active player at his table and sent Sai Wu to the rail in a spectacular hand with ace-six suited versus king-queen for top pair, when spiking an ace on the river.
Other big names that played twice to no avail were Sam Greenwood, Sylvain Loosli, Daniel Neilson, Kahle Burns, Isaac Haxton, Mustapha Kanit and Antoine Saout. Kanit turned a pair of eights and an open-ended straight draw, but the seven-three off suit of Quenneville for two pair held up. Neilson three-bet preflop with king-queen out of the blinds and fired three barrels against Vladimir Troyanovskiy, who rivered two pair with king-eight suited and snap-called the shove of the Aussie. Greenwood then bowed out in the last level when his ten-high flush draw on a king-high flop failed to get there against Sosia Jiang's ace-king for top pair.
Maria Ho, Kiryl Radzivonau and Rafael Moraes were among many further notables that only fired one bullet, and they can still re-enter the competition again tomorrow before the cards are back in the air for level 11. All new entries will receive 50,000 in chips and start their mission for High Roller glory with 25 big blinds at 1,000-2,000 and a running ante of 300.
Action recommences at 12.30 p.m. local time and the field is expected to grow still, the seat draw and prize pool information will be published when the registration has officially closed. It is scheduled to play a maximum of 10 levels of 60 minutes each on Day 2, or until the official final table of the last eight is reached, whichever of the two comes first.
The PokerNews live reporting team will be on the floor to bring you all the action from the tables until a winner is crowned on Sunday April 9th, and the 2017 PokerStars Championship Macau Main Event will also be heading into it's penultimate day as of 12 p.m. local time as well.