The 2019 World Poker Tour (WPT) Borgata Poker Open Main Event is into Day 3 as the survivors from the first two starting flights came together for Day 2 on Tuesday. Leading the remaining 145 players is Jonathan Jaffe with 1.035 million chips.
Just one other player goes into Day 3 with more than a million chips. That man would be Victor Ramdin with 1.016 million. After Ramdin there is a drop-off to a group of five players who have 848,000 chips or fewer.
Once registration closed after the first two levels on Tuesday, the total field was announced as 1,156. Of course, since there were unlimited re-entries, that number is total “entries” and not “players,” but it is still a great number. The $3 million guaranteed prize pool was easily overtaken, with the total prize pool ending up at $3,700,356. The tournament will pay to 145 places with a min-cash of $5,797. First place will win $616,186 and the entire six-handed final table will score six-figure cashes.
The chip leader, Jonathan Jaffe, is no stranger to amassing chips in a World Poker Tour event. He has made three final tables on the World Poker Tour and won partypoker.net WPT Montreal during the 2014-2015 season. And that’s three six-handed final tables that he made; Jaffe also has an eighth and ninth place finish on the Tour, which would be final tables in most major tournaments.
Jaffe’s career World Poker Tour earnings are $1,328,252. He has earned $2 million more than that in live tournaments overall. His top cash did not come in a victory, but rather a second place finish in the 2008 World Poker Finals Championship Event, for which he earned $670,636.
One of the more notable players in attendance this week is Vanessa Selbst. Selbst is far and away the all-time leader on the female money list for live tournaments with $11.851 million in earnings. The closest to her is the legendary Kathy Liebert with $6.285 million. Selbst is 64th overall on the all-time money list.
But Selbst left the poker life a couple years ago for a position in the financial sector. As stressful as finance can be, she made the change mainly because poker was too stressful of a lifestyle.
“You have no job security, no health insurance,” she told The New York Times. “You’re traveling constantly. You have no stability in terms of your life. And there are huge swings because if more people now have a chance to win, it’s very easy to have a losing year.”
She now lives in Brooklyn and had some time off before she starts a new job, so she decided to make the trip to Atlantic City to “give it a whirl.”
That whirl has worked out so far, as Selbst made it through Day 2 with 318,000 chips.
2019 World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open Main Event – Day 2 Chip Leaders
- Jonathan Jaffe – 1,035,000
- Victor Ramdin – 1,016,000
- Arian Stolt – 848,000
- Jean Gaspard – 835,000
- Justin Liberto – 818,000
- Jerry Maher – 808,000
- Uke Dauti – 806,000
- Nick Pupillo – 782,000
- Michael Stashin – 743,000
- Peter Vitantonio – 734,000