Big Stacks For Guimond And Biz On Day 2
Players and tournament directors expected a record-breaking tournament. The 2023 Merit Poker Retro Series $3,300 Main Event indeed broke records, with a total of 1,223 entrants. This field generated a total prize pool of $3,375,480, which is over the $3,000,000 guarantee.
Out of the 1,223 entrants, 215 players still had chips at the end of Day 2, and will come back on Wednesday, August 16 for Day 3. And they are led by Florian Guimond, who had the most chips of all (1,705,000). He is followed by Mustafa Biz (1,671,000), who already finished third in the High Roller a few days ago. The runner-up of the High Roller, Uri Reichenstein, also qualified for Day 3 with 1,079,000 chips.
| RANK | PLAYER | COUNTRY | CHIP COUNT | BLINDS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florian Guimond | France | 1,705,000 | 171 |
| 2 | Mustafa Biz | Turkey | 1,671,000 | 167 |
| 3 | Daniel Rezaei | Austria | 1,645,000 | 165 |
| 4 | Geo | 1,500,000 | 150 | |
| 5 | Zulfiya Kolgu | Kazakhstan | 1,494,000 | 149 |
| 6 | Ruslan Volkov | Ukraine | 1,461,000 | 146 |
| 7 | Milad Oghabian Langar | Iran | 1,433,000 | 143 |
| 8 | Razvan Sabau | Romania | 1,352,000 | 135 |
| 9 | Roman Novoselov | Russia | 1,328,000 | 133 |
| 10 | Kanan Taherkhani | Turkey | 1,310,000 | 131 |
Other notable players also put chips in their bags, such as PSPC finalist Thomas Eychenne (1,158,000), WPT winners Dmitry Gromov (1,158,000), Benjamin Hamnett (779,000), Alessio Isaia (757,000), or Andrey Pateychuk, who has a stack not much bigger than the starting stack (146,000).
The situation is way better for bracelet winners Dominik Panka (1,012,000) or Ran Koller (701,000). It also should have been the same for Bart Lybaert, who had a nice stack all day long. But it decreased at the end of the day, and he'll come back with 180,000 chips.
However, Lybaert is still in the race for the money. And Day 3 will be an important day, because the last 143 players will win a minimum cash prize of $4,390. But the the road to the first prize of $567,000 is still very long. It will start at noon on Level 19 (5,000/10,000 BB Ante 10,000) with 60-minute levels.
PokerNews will once again be on hand to deliver you all of the action.