Vasilijus Piskunovas Bags the Day 1 Chip Lead in the OlyBet Kings of Tallinn Main Event
The fifth edition of the OlyBet Kings of Tallinn €1,100 Main Event hosted by Olympic Park Casino and Hilton Tallinn Park was a huge success with 318 entrants ponying up the €1,100 buy-in.
This already crushes last year's record field of 268 entrants by 50. The record will be further extended with many players sharing they plan to enter for the first-time or re-enter before the late registration period ends at the conclusion of the first blind level of Day 2 tomorrow.
Players began today's deep-stacked action with 30,000 in chips and battled it out for eight hour-long blinds levels.
More than half of today's field survived today's action with Lithuania's Vasilijus Piskunovas leading the way among the 168 survivors with 189,900 in chips.
Also finishing the day in great shape was Dutch poker player Teun Hernar Mulder with 170,400 in chips. Mulder also felted OlyBet Team Pro Carmen-Elina Vist early on in the day when his pocket eights held against ace-queen. Vist reentered and bagged a healthy stack of 87,900.
Others bagging top five chip stacks included Lithuania's Alexandras Voisnis (third - 164,600), Finland's Jussi Mattila (fourth - 158,400), and Turkey's Bahadir Hatipoglu (fifth - 157,900).
In addition to Vist, three other OlyBet Team Pros entered today's field and bagged chips including Raigo Aasmaa (77,800), Dmitrijs Meless (61,500), and Markus Ylanne (43,300).
A number of big name pros also bagged chips including Finland's Ilari Sahamies (64,200), Anton "AnteSvante" Wigg (37,000), who PokerNews interviewed on Facebook Live today and 2019 WSOP Europe Main Event winner Jack Sinclair (31,700) who promised PokerNews an interview on Facebook tomorrow.
Day 2 of the Main Event will kick off at 12 p.m. local time tomorrow with blinds at 500/1,000 and a big blind ante of 1,000. We will post starting seat assignments before the action resumes.
As was the case today, the PokerNews Live Reporting Team will be back on the floor to provide complete coverage tomorrow and beyond until a winner is declared.
*Images courtesy of Rene Velli/Kings of Tallinn.