With three opening day flights in the books, the surviving players came together in the Crown Poker Room for the first time on Wednesday for Day 2 of the 2016 Aussie Millions Main Event.
A shorter day was enjoyed with just five levels of play but that was enough to reduce the field to a nice even 150 players. Our day one leaders continued to progress well with James Obst continuing to build his empire, while Alex Rocha and Jens Lakemeier both safely navigated their way through the day.
However the new pace-setter is none another than Australian young gun Dylan Honeyman.
Honeyman won an Aussie Millions side event back in 2013 and went as deep as 56th place in the Main Event last year. He clearly enjoys the big stage of the Aussie Millions, however today it was in the back corner of the satellite room where Honeyman quietly went about his business to amass a huge stack of 517,200.
With registration open until the end of Level 8, there were eight players who took advantage of the late registration period today to bring the total number of entrants to 732. That number is the biggest Aussie Millions Main Event in the last six years and the fourth largest of all time. Poker is alive and well “Down Under”.
However there are plenty of players who had dreams shattered on Day 2. Michael O’Grady, Graeme Putt, Matthew Wakeman, Billy Argyros, Marc Convey, Connor Drinan, Mike McDonald, Stevan Chew, Ronnie Bardah, former champion Tyron Krost and defending champion Manny Stavropoulos were among the high profile casualties during the day.
It also was an unlucky day for most of the Team PokerStars Pros in the field. Celina Lin was bounced very early and she was joined on the rail by Yaxi Zhu, Bryan Huang, Randy Lew, Chen-An Lin and Jason Mercier.
That left English rose Liv Boeree as the last red spade in the field. Boeree worked with a short stack for much of the day, but a late surge saw her reach 47,900 which will be enough to make some magic happen on Day 3.
Aussie Millions Day 2 Top Ten Chip Counts
Dylan Honeyman (Australia) – 517,200
Jean-Pascal Savard (Canada) – 455,200
Daniel Engles (Austria) – 427,300
Bobby Zhang (Australia) – 425,900
Jason Brown (New Zealand) – 401,600
James Obst (Australia) – 378,500
Artur Koren (Austria) – 361,100
Martin Rowe (Australia) – 311,200
Michael Egan (Australia) – 291,800
Michael Levy (Australia) – 291,600
Former APPT Sydney champion Martin Rowe (311,200), Las Vegas beauty Samantha Abernathy (269,500), Italian stallion Mustapha Kanit (269,100), 2014 Aussie Millions champ Ami Barer (263,500), high stakes crusher Philipp Gruissem (260,700), and WPT commentator Tony Dunst (256,900) all have healthy stacks to make a deep run into Day 3 and beyond.
Click here for the Day 2 counts and Day 3 Seating Draw
On Thursday we’ll see the surviving 150 players come together for Day 3 of the Main Event with the money on the horizon. The top 80 players will share the spoils with a min-cash worth AU$15,000. The bubble will no doubt produce some dramatic moments with the “pop” destined some time during the day, before the players start to set their sights on the top prize of AU$1.6 million.
Play will recommence at 12:30pm local and we’ll have all the action for you once again right here on the PokerStars Blog as well as a live stream on RunItUp.TV.
