Yijun Lin Wins Late to Take Top Spot as 45 Advance to Day 2
The third starting flight of the Big Stax XXXI 300 is in the books after another15 levels of play and at the end of the night, only 45 players found a bag from the 284 total entries.
A turn of events happened in one of the very last hands of the night as Renata Colace , who was chip leader with over 300,000 majority of the day and looked to be the clear chip leader, lost a monster hand to give Yijun Lin the top spot. Lin was nice enough to share the details of the hand with PokerNews as to how he ended the night as the chip leader.
Colace opened for 14,000 and was called by Lin and one other player. The flop fell 
and Colace lead out for 20,500 and Lin flatted. The other player raised to 51,000 and Colace moved all in and was called by opponents. Colace heald 
, Lin 
and the other opponent had 
. the turn paired the board with the 
and the 
river gave Lin the chip lead while Colace dropped to (215,00).
Second in chips was Michael Dalessandro (350,500) who had a rollercoaster of a day but somehow managed to grind all the way back up to the top of the leaderboard.
Margaret Bartelle (327,000), Guoliang Chen (306,500) and David Meschel (304,500) round out the top five stacks.
Other players to advance include Sean Bishop (299,500), Zhikai Gao (289,500), James Brady (261,500), and defending champ James Lillis (184,500).
One last starting flight remains, with Day 1d starting Saturday at 10 a.m. local time.
Come back to PokerNews for updates throughout the rest of the Big Stax XXXI 300 tournament.