Thursday, 28th March 2024 10:19
Home / Uncategorized / LAPT9 Chile: Francisco ‘Tomate’ Benitez leads the revenants on Day 1B

Have you seen that movie The Revenant? In it, Leonardo DiCaprio plays frontiersman Hugh Glass; a man on a revenge mission after being attacked by a bear and then left for dead by his backstabbing colleagues. In fact, that’s what a revenant is – someone who has come back from the dead.

Well, there weren’t any bears here on Day 1B of LAPT9 Chile, but there were plenty of revenants – i.e. players who busted Day 1A and were back today with a revived tournament life. In case you hadn’t guessed, it’s a re-entry event here at Viña del Mar.

The possibility to re-buy was too tempting for many, and in the end we had a total of 307 entries here on Day 1B, and a total of 565 across both Day 1 flights. That created a juicy prize pool of $737,325, with a handsome $141,785 up top for the winner.

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Francisco ‘Tomate’ Benitez
The player closest to that prize at the end of Day 1B is Uruguay’s Francisco ‘Tomate’ Benitez, who finished the day as our chip leader with 181,800. That tops Day 1A leader Sergio Palma’s 167,500, making Benitez the overall big stack going into Day 2. 102 players made it through from this flight, and in total 79 players will be paid, with a min-cash worth $2,500.

Parts of The Revenant were actually filmed in Argentina, and we had plenty of other Argentinians in the field today. Two-time LAPT champion Fabian Ortiz was back again, for one, having busted his Day 1A stack around 6pm. He fared a lot better today and will take 43,900 into Day 2.

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Ortiz survived
We also had two other members of that elusive two-time champ club in Mario Lopez and LAPT Player of the Year Oscar Alache. It was a rocky day for Lopez, who busted his first Day 1B bullet earlier and then bizarrely found himself sitting in the exact same seat once he’d re-entered. His stack was up and down all day, and he ended the day with 47,400.

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Lopez is coming back
Oscar Alache, on the other hand, couldn’t survive. The best player of LAPT’s Season 8 will have to wait a little longer to add to his trophy collection, as he busted his stack midway through Level 9.

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Alache might be Player of the Year, but he’s out of this one
The only player representing the red spade in Chile was Team PokerStars Pro Leo Fernandez, but he could never really get anything going here today. He nursed short stacks all the way until the last level of the day before being felted.

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Leo Fernandez is gone
After Benitez, the biggest stacks in the room belonged to Javier Venegas (158,200), Luis Alberto Aray LePiche (143,600), Roberly Felicio (126,200), Yoel Palmer (121,400), 
Andres Hemola (110,900), Carlos Polna (109,000
), Jose Paez (103,300
), and Amos Ben (101,100
). They’ll also be joined by Irina Petrova (22,100) and Francisco Belaustegui (28,000) on the lower end of the counts.

You can find all of the end of Day 1B chip counts here.

Meanwhile, some of the many eliminated players we had today included Bruno Severino, Renata Teixeira, Jorge Cantos, and Pablo Chacra.

Both the Day 1A and Day 1B survivors will combine at 12pm tomorrow for the beginning of Day 2. There’ll be a total of 192 players looking to become the next LAPT champ (click here for all the Day 2 chip counts) and blinds will be 600/1,200 with a 200 ante. Make sure you come back and follow the action.

Until then, you can catch up on all of the live updates from the past two days:

Day 1A live updates
Day 1B live updates

Photos by Carlos Monti.


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