Another short day has come to a close here at the Crown Perth Poker Room, but six levels was enough time to reduce our ANZPT Perth Main Event field from 108 to the final 33 players. They are currently bagging up their chips to return on Saturday for Day 3 of play, but one of the cruel twists is that two days of toil does not yet guarantee a profit. We’re still nine players away from a min-cash for the final 24 players, so tomorrow is going to bring some tales of woe for the nine players who fail to cash.
Jesse McKenzie started today as a runaway chip leader, but he was quickly brought back down to Earth when he got a little frisky with pocket sixes. He ran into an opponent’s pocket kings and his day one good fortune eluded him this time around. From there it just went from bad to worse, as McKenzie got his last chips into the middle late in the day against Emanuel Seal. McKenzie had flopped a set, which had been so fruitful for him the previous day, but Seal’s top pair turned into a backdoor straight to eliminate McKenzie in dramatic fashion.
Along the way we also lost ANZ Player of the Year contenders Michael Guzzardi and Jie Gao, as well as our last two remaining Team PokerStars Pros in Bryan Huang and Angel Guillen. Huang was short-stacked and failed to double up with queen-eight against ace-jack, while Guillen lost a key coinflip with ace-queen against pocket tens.
As the stars fell, a few new names rose to the top. John Lane, Pawel Zawadowicz and Bradley Douglas commanded big stacks, before it looked like local Ken Hunter was going to snatch the late lead when his pocket queens won a huge three-way preflop clash.
However in the end, it was the relentless pressure of James Broom that powered into the chip lead with an impressive stack of 317,300. We didn’t see Broom in too many big pots, but he stole a heck of a lot of small ones, with plenty of bluffs and steals thrown in.
Broom is an accomplished player with over $200,000 in live tournament earnings, and even more than that online, including a previous win and runner-up result in the PokerStars Sunday 500 tournament.
Broom’s aggressive style is so difficult to combat, and his opponents are going to have a tough time stopping him from reaching this ANZPT final table.
Some others through to Day 3 action include Kent Hunter (261,700), Ricky Kroesen (150,800), Dale Marsland (149,300), Ivan Zalac (142,300), 2011 Aussie Millions champ David Gorr (94,000), Aussie Millions Millions bracelet winner Siyu Sha (64,000), Emanuel Seal (57,100), Fabian Craib (51,400), Daniel Botta (31,000) and Tristan Bain (24,100). Refer to the live updates section for a full list of chip counts and the draw for Day 3.
The final 33 players will return at 12:30pm tomorrow with some nervous moments expected through the money bubble before we power our way to the final table. Thanks for your company again today and we hope you’ll join us again tomorrow. Until then, so long from Perth!
