Gagliano tops Day 1B field as PokerStars Festival Main Event heads to Day 2

It’s one of those weeks where we seem to only be concerning ourselves with champions. The World Series of Poker has its 2016 champion. So soon will baseball’s World Series.

Now, from our spot at Resorts Casino in Atlantic City, we can comfortably turn our full attention to figuring out who will be the first PokerStars Festival New Jersey Main Event champ.

After two days of play here in this PokerStars Festival Main Event, the field has been reduced to 70 players, all of whom are within hours of making the money. Day 1A ended with 25 players remaining. Today’s flight finished with 45. Full chip counts are here. Here’s the seat draw for Day 2.

Day 1A’s leader, Ruben Costa, remains atop the entire field with 222,500. He’ll be joined by tonight’s leaders who just bagged up stacks to put them in contention for a final table. They include Michael Gagliano (144,900), Daniel Howe (138,900), Team PokerStars Pro Online Randy Lew (130,200) and Darren Elias (118,900)

The Day 1B field saw stars of all sorts. The winner of the first NJCOOP Main Event Jesse Elliot showed up here and proved he was no flash in the pan. He finished on 75,700 and is headed to Day 2. Dan Sewnig, the winner of Jason Somerville’s Run It Up Resorts Rumble and the first PokerStarsNJ Main Event satellite, lasted for most of the day here before finally falling to Survivor’s Tyson Apostol. The latter proved his game on the felt was just as good as his game on the beach. He finished the day with 135,200.

Now that we have finished the two starting flights, the players will set off to make some money. The top 39 players will get paid. The winner will take home $38,220. Here’s the full list of payouts for the Main Event.

Tomorrow, the two flights will come together in this room in what is almost certain to be a race to the cash. Join us here beginning at 11am when our live coverage will resume.

Until then, have look at all of today’s reports here. Goodnight from Atlantic City.

Brad Willis is the PokerStars Head of Blogging. Follow him on Twitter: @BradWillis.