Eardley Tops Day 1a; Gorodetsky Among Big Stacks in Sochi
The first of three starting days of the 2017 partypoker LIVE MILLIONS Russia $5,300 Main Event at the stunning Casino and Resort Sochi in Krasnaya Polyana is done and dusted. There were a total of 262 entries, which includes players that qualified through the phase one satellites on partypoker, as well as direct entries here in Sochi, and just 157 players made it through after eight levels of 60 minutes each.
At the top of the counts at the end of the day was UK's Matt Eardley with 4,413,000 closely followed by Petr Gabyshev with 4,048,000. Timofey Vekshin, who vaulted to the spotlight after sending Vitaliy Li to the rail, claimed the third-biggest stack with 3,709,000. Other big stacks and notables that made it through include Gurkan Gorguren (3,465,000), Artem Bezarenkov (3,450,000), Shyngis Satubayev (3,236,000), Franco Cantarella (3,203,000), and well-known Russian poker commentator Ilya Gorodetskiy (2,694,000).
Three players representing partypoker bagged up chips for Day 2 in Anatoly Filatov (2,400,000), Dzmitry Urbanovich (1,320,000) and Mike Sexton (495,000). They were joined by Richard Dubini and Jan-Peter Jachtmann, but both failed to run up their stacks. Dubini flopped the nut straight with ace-king only to see Jonathan Hayward get there on the river with five-deuce suited for a flush when the remainder of the chips went in. Jachtmann raised and called a three-bet by Alexander Krasuntcev to shove a jack-high flop with a gutshot and straight flush draw. Krasuntcev called with ace-jack for top pair and two blanks on turn and river spelled the end for Jachtmann.
Among those to run out of chips were Jonathan Hayward, James Lowrey, Nicolas Le Floch, Vladimir Geshkenbein, Natalia Panchenko and Josef Snejberg. Some of them will be back tomorrow for sure after qualifying with two stacks to take another shot at the guaranteed prize pool of $5,000,000.
Day 1b gets underway at 12 p.m. local time and the third and final flight, a 20-minute level turbo Day 1c follows on Monday September 11th 2017 before all survivors head straight into Day 2 as of 3 p.m. local time. The PokerNews live reporting team will provide all the action until a winner is crowned here in Sochi, so make sure to tune back in regularly.