Day 2 of the Main Event is the shortest scheduled day of the tournament, lasting just six levels. That’s because levels 1-14 last 75 minutes, but from level 15 onwards they increase to 90 minutes. The third level of the day has just finished and this is how things are shaping up

 

Mid-day update

Registration was open until the start of play today and six players took the opportunity to buy-in this morning including Jason Wheeler – who was busy yesterday finishing third in the €10,000 one day High Roller – and Dzmitry Urbanovich who loves to enter these things late on.

The Pole has already run his stack of 30,000 up to 90,000 but whilst that’s impressive he’d need to treble that to catch the current chip leader. That honour is currently bestowed upon Alexander Ivarsson who is up to 280,000 after busting WSOP APAC champion Scott Davies in a big pot.

The pot was four-bet pre-flop with Ivarsson having the betting lead. Davies check-raised all-in on the 8♥10♥5♣ flop with A♦10♠ and Ivarsson snap called with pocket aces which held on the Q♥ turn and J♠ river.

Ivarsson – primed for another deep EPT runThe Swede has had a number of deep runs in EPT Main Events, finishing 49th in Barcelona in August, 24th here in March and 48th at EPT11 Deauville. He leads a chasing pack that includes: Pasquale Gregorio (240,000), Jens Lakemeier (230,000), Berhard Haider (230,000) and Farid Jattin (206,000).

 

Selected chip counts

With level 12 underway the blinds are now 800/1,600 ante 200. At the start of the level there were 234 players remaining making the average stack 83,500. Below are selected chip counts of the players left in

Bryn Kenney 

Notable eliminations

Over the first three levels the field of 392 was reduced to 234 and there were plenty of notables among those eliminated. Andrew Chen was the first player out today, not surprising given he started with just 4,900.

Team PokerStars Pro Jake Cody was another early casualty. He defended his big blind with [A][10] against a raise from Dan Smith. The Brit then check-called bets on the flop and turn of a [A][10][3][3] board and the rest of the chips went in on a [J] river where Cody discovered the bad news when Smith showed [K][Q] for broadway.

Other notable bust outs include:

Cody – gone

Shahade – also outEverything about EPT Malta is on the main EPT Malta page. More specifically, all the side event coverage can be found here.

Begin plotting your own bid for EPT glory by downloading the PokerStars client and having a crack. Follow this EPT event via the EPT app. There you will get all the latest news, chip counts and payouts. You can download it on Android or IOS

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