Fresh off the opening tournament of their Season XI schedule on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, the World Poker Tour is wasting little time in getting back to action with their inaugural Season XI tournament on American soil.
The entirety of the WPT staff arrived at the Parx Casino in Bensalem, PA, for the first televised event of the Season XI schedule yesterday, featuring the first of two Day Ones. The $3500 buy in tournament is offering one of the unique twists to the WPT schedule from last year – the re-entry option – meaning that any player eliminated on Day 1A has the option of returning for Saturday’s play. That didn’t keep the crème of the poker world from turning out on Day 1A, however.
As it started, 204 players were in their chairs when the cards hit the air on Friday. Some of the more notable names had some tough beats in the early going, with Jon “PearlJammer” Turner running pocket Kings into his opponent’s pocket Aces one of the big hands. Todd Terry also dropped a few chips when, on two occasions, he saw pocket Aces and pocket Kings out-flopped when Joseph Cheong hit sets against him. He only dropped slightly more than 5K in tournament chips, however, prompting Olivier Busquet to ask him over Twitter, “How do you have any chips left?”
It seemed that there weren’t any soft tables around the Parx Casino as, by the time late registration ended for Day 1A, there were 234 players in action. On one table, Will “The Thrill” Failla had the task of battling against the uber-aggressive Dwyte Pilgrim and Victor Ramdin; Matt Glantz, the Parx Casino ambassador, went to battle against Canada’s Xuan Liu and former WPT champion Steve Brecher; and defending European Poker Tour Grand Final champion Mohsin Charania squared off with recently minted World Series of Poker bracelet winner David “ODB” Baker and Ravi Raghavan.
As the play worked through the afternoon hours, there were some notables that didn’t survive the wars on the green baize. Charania, Turner, Roland Israelashvili and Allen Kessler dropped from the tournament and, by the time the dinner bell rang, 170 players were left from the original 234 entries. After the sustenance, the rate of knockouts picked up to a frenetic pace as the field would be whittled down to double digits by the end of the night.
The evening hours proved to be a profitable one for several players. Raghavan was able to push his stack up to over 166K in chips and Pilgrim was able to put himself into the mix by finishing with 120K in chips, despite being the ringleader for a table-wide game of “Lodden Thinks.” Christian Harder, defending WPT L. A. Poker Classic champion Sean Jazayeri, Brock Parker, Faraz Jaka, Nick Binger, Dan Shak and Liu also were able to negotiate the Day 1A minefield to be among the 93 players who survived the day.
1. Cornel Cimpan, 242,800
2. Gregory Shuarts, 220,000
3. William Brandise, 208,300
4. Ravi Raghavan, 166,500
5. Brian Taylor, 135,600
6. Paul Volpe, 132,800
7. Bryan Piccioli, 125,000
8. Dwyte Pilgrim, 120,000
9. Shaun Deeb, 118,900
10. Victor Ramdin, 115,300
Because of the re-entry nature of the WPT Parx Open Poker Classic, final numbers will not be known until later today when a new batch of players – and some of those busted from Day 1A – will step up to take on the fight. Delayed slightly by a flight cancelation, Kathy Liebert has already stated she will be a part of the Day 1B field while WPT “Raw Deal” announcer Tony Dunst and Matt Brady have already commented over Twitter that they will be firing a second bullet today. According to the staff of the WPT, there are 87 players who have early registered for today’s play and it is expected that the entries will reach the 500 mark during today’s afternoon action.
