Friday, 29th March 2024 09:17
Home / Uncategorized / PokerStars Championship Macau: Petrangelo powers his way to the top in the High-Roller

The field was awash with notable faces here for day one of the PokerStars Championship HK $100K Single Re-Entry Shot Clock High Roller. They were everywhere I turned.

Oh look, there’s Ike Haxton, oh… no, he’s gone. Oh cool, Mustapha Kanit is at a table with John Juanda – this’ll be good. Ah, there’s Steve O’Dwyer who already has a monster stack despite having been in for 3 minutes, of course! Oh no, Mustapha’s out now too. Hold on, what’s Haxton doing sat at that table, I thought he bust? Oh yeah, it’s a re-buy…

And so on.

PSC Macau_Velli-753_Mustapha Kanit.jpg

Why so serious Mustapha?

Of the 174 that started today, 80 have bagged chips for day two. This, alongside the 39 re-entries, has created a prize-pool of HK $16,781,000 (a tad over $2 million). It means it’ll be quite the pay-day for the winner when they are eventually crowned on Sunday.

The day started slowly with 30 players sat in their chairs at the start of play. Ike Haxton soon joined, as did David Peters, Nick Petrangelo, Jack Salter and Dan Smith among others. It eventually brought play up to speed – which was helped even more by the stop clock format. It saw players given 30-seconds to act before their hands were mucked. Overall it’s been a hit with the field, and made for a quick pace of play.

The player to set the fastest pace was Nick Petrangelo who ends the day with 274,000 chips. It was built steadily built throughout the day after “crushing everyone on the table” according to tablemate Daniel Tsang. He’s followed closely by Yang Wang who sits just a two blinds behind on 270,000.

PSC Macau_Velli-776_Nick Petrangelo.jpg

Petrangelo: Bossing the table and the day

Players that couldn’t keep up included the likes of Ike Haxton, Mustapha Kanit and Stevan Chew who all busted after their second bullets in quick succession. Kanit went out first time when his pair of kings were trumped against Canlin Chen’s set of queens and second time when he failed to hit his open ender with top pair on the board against Quenneville’s two pair.

Here are the current chip-counts at the end of the day:

Nick Petrangelo 274,000
Yang Wang 270,000
Neel Murthy 259,400
Paul-Francois Tedeschi 250,000
Troy Quenneville 239,200

Other players still in the mix include the likes of Team Pro’s Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew and palz Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier, and Felipe Ramos – the latter is doing the best of the Team Pro bunch on 87,400. Aside from that Lovgren has a decent 193,100 chips, David Peters sits on 115,700 fresh from the Main and Steve O’Dwyer has exactly 300 chips more following his Super-High roller victory earlier in the week.

PSC Macau_Velli-762_Sofia Lovgren.jpg

Smiles for Sofia

Join us for Day 2 coverage from 12.30am local time tomorrow as we play out another 10 levels to whittle the field down to the final eight. As ever, we’ll be providing the updates throughout the day and our friends at PokerNews are on the live coverage.

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