Piers Leads Into Day 3; Esfandiari and O'Dwyer Steal Day 2 Headlines
Day 3 of the 2016 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $5,300 Main Event arrives today, with 195 of the 928 players that entered this tournament still alive for the 13th PCA title and $833,260 top prize.
Brazil's Leonardo Pires finished Day 2 with the most chips, bagging up 524,000, but his impressive run to the top was overshadowed by two big stories.
First was Antonio Esfandiari and his disqualification from the event. Late on Day 2, Esfandiari admitted to urinating in an undercover container while in the tournament, a decision tied to a prop bet with Bill Perkins that required him to lunge everywhere he went for 48 hours. He said that all of the lunging made it extremely painful to move, but believed he took things too far and that it was a lack of judgement on his behalf. At the time of the disqualification, Esfandiari had about 100,000 in chips.
Then there was the run of Steve O'Dwyer, who played only the last level on Day 1a, bagged up 31,400 in chips from the 30,000-chip starting stack, and then ran it all the way up to 430,900 on Day 2 — good for fourth place on the leaderboard. O'Dwyer doubled early on Day 2 with 
versus Mark Radoja's 
and said "it was all skill from there." O'Dwyer can almost do no wrong in poker events as of late, and he's coming off a big $945,000 victory in the PCA's $50,000 Single-Day High Roller on Saturday night.
Others doing well for themselves on Day 2 were Sampson Simmons (421,400), Ami Barer (353,000), Joao Vieira (317,900), Mike Watson (298,800), and Tony Gregg (272,300).
When it comes to the PCA Main Event, Gregg is one of the best performers the event has ever seen. Although he hails from Maryland, Gregg has an amazing sense of home-court advantage in the Bahamas. His first real big splash onto the poker scene was in this event when he placed second back in 2009 for $1.7 million from a field of 1,347 players. Just three years later, in 2012, Gregg found his way back to the final table from a field of 1,072 players and took sixth for $364,000. He'll enter Day 3 in 18th chip position from the remaining 195 players and a heavy favorite to make another very deep run.
Just like play on Sunday, Monday's Day 3 will see another five 90-minute levels take place. The blinds will start at 1,200/2,400/300 and escalate up to 3,000/6,000/1,000 throughout the day. There will be a break following each level, and play is scheduled to end around 8:30-9 p.m. local time. The top 135 spots will reach the money, and that is something that should happen today.
Stay tuned to PokerNews all day long for continued coverage of the 2016 PCA Main Event.