After a sizeable outpouring of entries for the first day of a tournament, longtime grinder Barry Hutter has emerged as the leader of Day 1A of the World Poker Tour’s Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown in Hollywood, FL.
Under the format of the tournament (which will also be used on the two other Day Ones of the tournament Friday and Saturday), players who busted before the dinner break of the tournament had the option to rebuy as many times as they wanted for another $3500 brick of cash. The time period before dinner also served as a late registration period for the event. By the time Level 2 of the tournament had begun, 351 entries had been registered and players continued to trickle through the doors.
With the loose rules on the entry format of this tournament, the play was understandably aggressive throughout the day. The latest champion of the WPT, Ravee Mathi Sundar (victor at the WPT Rolling Thunder), lost a few chips early when, on a Q-3-2-8-5 board, he was called on the river by his opponent. Sundar could only muster Big Slick on the three diamond board, but his opponent wasn’t much better; his pocket tens would take the hand and send Sundar down to 21K in chips.
Hutter was a late registration player, but he wasted little time getting his chips into action. After only slightly more than a level of play, he had more than tripled his starting stack to 97,000. That lead was short lived, however, as WPT Champions’ Club member Anthony Zinno knocked out two players (including former World Champion Ryan Riess) when his flopped set of sixes stood to push him to 110K in chips. Not amused by Zinno’s work, Hutter became the first person to crack the 200K barrier (228,000, to be exact) just before the dinner break after he turned a King to go with the Queen on the flop in his K-Q hole cards to crack Joe McKeehen’s pocket Aces.
Following the dinner break, the official numbers for Day 1A were announced and they were extremely surprising. Normally the first day of a multi-Day One tournament is the least popular for the players, but the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown proved to be different. As Level 7 started after the dinner break, a stunning 502 entries had been received for the tournament.
With the end of the re-entry period for Day 1A, the official list of players eliminated could also begin to be compiled. Aaron Massey, Shannon Shorr, Joe Kuether, Zo Karim, Jared Jaffee and defending WPT World Champion Keven Stammen all would be felled by the late evening action, but they will have the option of coming back for another taste of the tournament on Friday. As these players departed the Seminole Hard Rock tournament arena, Hutter kept the ship going forward as he emerged from the day’s carnage as the chip leader over the 182 players who remain in the tournament.
1. Barry Hutter, 305,700
2. Danny Shiff, 213,300
3. Eliyahu Levy, 210,100
4. Michael Wang, 207,900
5. Luis Santoni, 184,500
6. Vladimir Dobrovolskiy, 182,900
7. Ty Reiman, 182,400
8. Jake Schindler, 181,700
9. Daniel Demissie, 179,800
10. Brian Altman, 170,100
Hovering under the Top Ten are such notable names as Chance Kornuth (159,600), Darren Elias (150,000), Faraz Jaka (149,900), Dan Heimiller (146,800) and Matthew Waxman (138,500).
Day 1B will begin at noon at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and, if Day 1A was any indication, it promises to be another wild one. In fact, if the players come out as strongly as they did on Day 1A, it is possible that the WPT might set a record for largest number of entries into an event (currently held by the 1313-entry field for the 2011 Borgata Poker Open). The weekend looks to be a busy one as the players take part in the final tournament before the WPT World Championship later this month.
