Day 1 of the 2021 PokerStars SCOOP-72-H: $10,300 NLHE [8-Max] has concluded with nine players making it through to the final table. In the end, it was Jon "apestyles" Van Fleet who would claim the chip lead with 8,218,008 in chips. The first five hours of the tournament attracted 73 unique players who reentered 47 times to get to 120 entries in total. This created an attractive prize pool of $1,200,000 which easily surpassed the initial $1,000,000 that was set aside for this event.

With the elimination of Eelis "EEE27" Pärssinen, Van Fleet worked his way up the counts and grabbed the chip lead when he took out David "dpeters17" Peters in 14th place. He never really had to look back since then as he also took out "mrG01R4NG", Timothy "Tim0thee" Adams, and burst the final table bubble by eliminating Marius "DEX888" Gierse.

Following him in the counts and joining him on the final table are Thomas "WushuTM" Muehloecker, Wiktor "Iimitless" Malinowski, Christian "WATnlos" Rudolph, Bruno "great dant" Volkmann, Linus "LLinusLLove" Loeliger, Damian "pampa27" Salas, Christoph "26071985" Vogelsang, and Talal "raidalot" Shakerchi.

SCOOP-72-H: $10,300 NLHE [8-Max] Final Table Chip Counts

The only PokerStars Ambassador to battle in this field today was Sam "SamSquid" Grafton but things didn't go too well for him. He lost a big chunk of his stack early on to triple up through Francisco "Tomatee" Benitez and Teun "tinnoemulder" Mulder to lose it all again ten minutes later when called the shove of Samuel "€urop€an" Vousden with ace-queen on the trey-eight-eight-six-deuce board. Vousden held the pocket kings for two pair to bust the Brit in the fifth level of the day.

But he wasn't the only one who would leave the tournament without cashing. Benjamin "bencb789" Rolle, Juan "Malaka$tyle" Pardo, Orpen "OrpTheTurk" Kisacikoglu, Fedor "CrownUpGuy" Holz, Sam "Str8$$$Homey" Greenwood, Matthias "iambest2" Eibinger, and Ole "wizowizo" Schemion all fired the maximum amount of three bullets and all missed with them.

Mikita "fish2013" Badziakouski busted to Adams when he had rivered a flush but saw the Canadian held the nut-flush before Sami "Lrslzk" Kelopuro three-bet shoved his 23 big blinds in with ace-queen. Rudolph had picked up aces and jammed his slightly bigger stack in from the big blind for initial raiser Muehloecker to fold. The aces held for the bubble to burst.

Vicent "gordon0410" Bosca, Peters, Pascal "Pass_72" Lefrancois, "mrG01R4NG", Adams, and Gierse all cashed but fell before the end of the day. The nine remaining players will return on Wednesday, April 21 at 7:05 p.m. CEST to play down to a winner and the action will be covered by James Hartigan and Joe Stapleton on the PokerStars Twitch and YouTube channels.

As there will be cards-up coverage of the event, there will be a 30-minute security delay but the commentary will be live. Hartigan and Stapleton will be joined by special guests so that's definitely something to look forward to. PokerNews will be providing the updates right here on a similar delay and this is what the nine remaining players are all still playing for: