Halfway Home; Day 2 Concludes
It was an up-and-down day for a number of notables. Jeff Sarwer started the day moving in the wrong direction, but he quickly righted the ship to find his stack moving towards the top once again. A failed three-barrel bluff and a few lost showdowns later though, and Sarwer had been relegated to the rail. This Day 2 exit marks his earliest elimination and first non-cashing performance in the last three EPT events.
While some of the Team PokerStars Pros were vaulting up the board, others were finding the going a little tougher. Katja Thater, Thierry van den Berg, Marcel Luske, and Alexander Kravchenko all failed to get much going today. Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier managed to get his stack moving early, but he would tumble down and eventually out in the last half of the day.
As players continued to drop out at the cyclic rate, a few players really started to assert themselves. Luca Pagano had a good day, and he moved his stack pretty consistently in the right direction. Arnaud Mattern sat patiently and waited for his spots, and he was rewarded with a late double up to boost his stack back into contention. Not surprisingly, Antony Lellouche is up there in the mix as well. The gregarious French pro has had no trouble amassing chips during the middle stages of EPT events, and he'll be looking to avoid another in a long line of late-stage blowups as this event progresses.
Pieter de Korver rode a late surge into the top five on the scoreboard, but he couldn't quite get himself into first place. That honor appears to belong to relative unknown Yann Brosolo and his stack of 574,100. We'll have to wait for the full chip counts before we can be absolutely certain, but we couldn't find a mightier stack than that.
So that's it for Day 2 then, and the first half of this event. We and the remaining players will be back in the house tomorrow at high noon to burst the bubble and play down to the final few tables. We'll see you then!