It’s another glorious day here in Cebu. A picture postcard 31 degrees Celsius with stunning sunshine and blue skies. It’s a wonderful day for the beach or pool, which I’m sure is what many of our eliminated players will be doing today. Suddenly the pain of being eliminated from a major poker tournament doesn’t feel quite so bad.

But for the 128 survivors it’s time to put away the beach towels and knuckle down to business. There’s a PHP21,953,040 prize pool to play for, and today is where things start to get serious.

We’re expecting to play another six or seven levels today, which should get us pretty close to the money stage for the top 28 players. We may not quite burst the bubble today, which will no doubt make for some tense moments this time tomorrow.

One player who shouldn’t be feeling too tense is Macau’s Antonio Martins. Our Day 1b chip leader bagged up 119,000 which is now good for the biggest stack in the room entering Day 2.

Lee Sang Yong from Korea and Kua Wei Zhong from the Singapore are the next best. While players from Asia are out in the lead at the moment, it’s worth noting that 42 different countries were represented at the APPT Cebu which is a very international field. Australia (13%), Japan (8%) and Korea (6%) had the largest numbers of players in attendance.

We also have three members of Team PokerStars still alive with Raymond Wu, Celina Lin and the defending champion Vivian Im, but each of them will need an early double up or two to get back into contention. We’ll be keeping a close eye on them in the early stages of play today.

The action recommences at 12:15pm local time, which is only a few minutes away. I can almost smell the suckling pig already…

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