"mandan1979" Tops 93 Survivors as Big Names Retain Chances for SCOOP Title
Another Progressive Knockout tournament of the 2020 PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) ensured a lot of action on the third day of the festival and Event #10-H: $1,050 NLHE drew a total of 1,157 entries, easily surpassing the initial guarantee. Even the 890 unique entries would have sufficed but an additional 267 re-entries boosted the prize pool to $1,157,000, of which the top 143 spots locked up a portion of the cash pool.
After the completion of 8h30 of play, only 93 players made it through in the hopes of scoring further bounty prizes and potentially claiming the top prize of $79,644.69. Romania's "mandan1979" topped the counts as only player above five million and has 5,080,902 to his name. He is followed by Lithuania's "Mikensonas" with 4,365,087 and third-placed "jorginho88" is trailing by quite a margin with 3,023,682.
Other big stacks and notables that made it through are "bukharkov777" (2,957,914), "Passiveaggro" (1,698,609), Ariel "ArielBahia" Celestino (1,296,197), Manuel "manuverd0n" Bardon (1,031,526), Swedish phenomena Simon "C. Darwin2" Mattsson (977,912), as well as the three former EPT Main Event champions Robin "robinho" Ylitalo (1,153,065), Andrey "ThePateychuk" Pateychuk (1,142,296) and Rob "batoelrob" Hollink (718,459).
Two-time SCOOP Main Event champion Gianluca "Tankanza" Speranza will also return for Day 2, however, he will be the shortest stack with just 76,694 after losing an overpair against a flushdraw at the very end.
The bubble burst in the late stages of the night and one player in particular stood out, though he in fact didn't even make it through to Day 2. Andras "probirs" Nemeth was one of many participants that needed to fire a second bullet and ran that one up to a big stack. He burst the bubble after rivering a straight with ten-six versus ace-queen and doubled into an impressive lead with fewer than half an hour to go for the night.
Nemeth then doubled eventual chip leader "mandan1979" twice in quick succession and when his nine-four suited hit running spades for a flush in another big pot, the Hungarian High Roller regular ran into the royal flush of "bukharkhov" to go from chip leader to 102nd place finisher in extraordinary fashion. Nemeth collected $1,489.46 in cash and $7,656.25 in bounty prizes for his efforts.
None of the four PokerStars ambassadors made it to the cash money stage either, though, Lex "L-Veldhuis" Veldhuis, Ben "Spraggy" Spragg, Fintan "easywithaces" Hand and Ramon "RamonColillas" Colillas all earned bounty prizes. Veldhuis was among the early big stacks but his ace-jack was flushed away by the ace-nine suited of "Sasuke234".
Many other big names came and left without much to show for either such as Niklas "Lena900" Astedt, Pedro "PaDiLhA SP" Padilha, Patrick "pads1161" Leonard, Jon "apestyles" Van Fleet, Jerry "Perrymejsen" Odeen, Jack "Swaggersorus�� Sinclair, and Event #2-H champion Jorryt "TheCleaner11" van Hoof.
The smallest bounty up for grabs stands at $500 thus far while the largest one is worth $6,375. Returning blinds will be 15-000/30,000 with a running ante of 3,750 and the tournament will play down to a champion on May 3rd, 2020, as of 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Who will be next to collect a SCOOP title for his resume? Find out right here on PokerNews as we provide all the action from start-to-finish.