My fellow Poker News Daily writer, Earl Burton, hit on this yesterday, but man, it is really strange that Season XIV of the World Poker Tour (WPT) has started already considering Season XIII just ended on Friday. Poker is certainly different than other sports with more traditional seasons, so for most poker players, the WPT Canadian Spring Championship just feels like another major event, but it is still odd. Imagine what it would be like if the Super Bowl (do I have to pay the NFL to type that?) was played on a Sunday night and then the NFL season started on Thursday? As a Green Bay Packers fan, I wish the NFL season started right away, so we could put that agonizing loss in the NFC Championship Game behind us, but I digress. Poker. We were talking about poker. Day 2 of the WPT Canadian Spring Championship is in the books and just 45 players remain, led by Ari Engel with 1,014,000 chips.
The top of the leaderboard is extremely spread out for a big tourney such as this, especially one with just 45 players remaining. Engel is the only player with more than a million chips. After him, there’s a 200,000 chip drop-off to Trevor Delaney and then another gap of more than 200,000 to Eric Afriat in third place. Things compress a bit more after that, but with Shaan Siddiqui in tenth place with 362,500, that’s quite the range from first to tenth.
Engel started the day with 68,100 – perfectly solid chip stack, though not particularly large. He played steady poker throughout the day, not seeming to hit any extremely gigantic hands (or so it looks, based on WPT.com’s report), just taking down pots on a regular basis to grow his stack. One of his bigger hands came during Level 17 just after dinner when he was already the chip leader. He raised to 11,500 pre-flop and Diana Shamshoum called. On the flop of 9-6-6, Shamshoum bet 20,000, only to see Engel put her all-in for about 108,000 chips. She thought about it for several minutes before finally calling, revealing K-9. Unfortunately for her, Engel had her dominated with K-J and turned it into a flush for good measure, eliminating Shamshoum from the tournament.
Ari Engel has won over $2 million on the live tournament circuit according to TheHendonMob.com and though he has had a couple deep runs, he is still searching for his first WPT title.
The WPT Canadian Spring Championship is in Day 3 right now and will go for just four 90-minute levels today.
2015 World Poker Tour Canadian Spring Championship Main Event – Day 2 Chip Leaders
1. Ari Engel – 1,014,000
2. Trevor Delaney – 804,000
3. Eric Afriat – 570,000
4. Jonathan Karamalikis – 538,000
5. Gary Lucci – 473,000
6. Dylan Wilkerson – 424,000
7. Noeung Troeung – 418,500
8. Senthuran Vijayaratnam – 409,500
9. Benoit Jean – 390,500
10. Shaan Siddiqui – 362,500