A total of 358 players turned up to play Day 1B of the UKIPT Edinburgh in the Balmoral Hotel, making the final number a record breaking 612, beating last year's 519. That means someone will walk away from Monday's final table with a huge £101,000, not a bad way to start the year (Full payouts can be seen here). Best placed to achieve that goal is Liam Horgan who bagged up 119,800 chips, good to take the overall lead heading into Day 2 tomorrow.
Hot on his heals include: Rob Yong (119,100), Chris Derrick (104,000), Matthew Holliday (97,000), Jeff Kimber (72,500), Dominic Kay (77,900), Kevin Williams (57,000) and defending champion Fintan Gavin (45,500).
Yong played like a man without a care in the world today and had the very clear intention of having a big stack or no stack. He managed the former, just missing out on the chip lead. He terrorised his table getting opponents off big hands and also donated at times, he said. Kimber's stack rose steadily today. He busted short stacks and managed to flop a set to win a bigger pot off the table "live wire" as he described him. Williams managed to win a flip to bust the talented Ben Jenkins and cracked aces with a flush draw. Kay managed to crack kings with queen-jack and was also helped when he flopped a full house and watched an opponent donate to him with queen-high.
The big news at the start of the day was the UKIPT debut of the newest member of Team Poker Stars Pro, Jake Cody. Fresh from the PCA but not fresh from jet-lag, the Rochdale man needed several energy drinks to grind out a finishing stack of 15,500. He was not the lone team member to make the long journey from Paradise to the sub-zero temperatures north of the border. Marcel Luske donned a three-piece suit and had a somewhat swingy day. The swing came to a stop when he busted late on. Then there were the bad fortunes of the De Meulder twins. Matthias never managed to get much going today, Charles Chattha dealing the final blow when his [ah][qd] held against the Belgian's [as][6s] on a [3d][ks][2d][ad][qc] board. Christophe lasted longer but busted in the last level of the night. PokerStars Team Online's Grzegorz Mikielewicz scraped through with 12,600 and has a lot of work to do tomorrow.
The tournament will be an easier, and quieter, environment tomorrow after Sam Grafton fell during the last level of the day. He was cruising for long periods but three blows cost him his tournament life. The online star says he really enjoyed himself though and is constantly adjusting his game to the live environment thanks to help from Cody. He was joined on the rail by such luminaries as Dominik Nitsche, Sam Razavi, Simon Deadman, Alun Bowden and Joeri Zandvliet.
The remaining 267 players from both Days 1A and 1B will combine tomorrow for another eight levels of play. After that we'll all be donning our dancing shoes and paintig Edinburgh red as the official PokerStars party will take place at the Opal Lounge. Until then we bid you goodnight.
Full chip counts can be seen on our chipcount page here . To catch up on the day's action click on the links below:
All photos are copyright of Mikey May. Her Sorceress Viking powers peak when the snow falls so beware as Edinburgh is coated white this evening.