Friday, 29th March 2024 07:10
Home / Uncategorized / LAPT6 Chile: The sun’ll come out tomorrow

The last three days have been beautiful days in Viña del Mar. Every day, as the bloggers chowed down on lunch at La Barquera, a casino restaurant with a huge bank of curving windows looking directly out onto the Pacific Ocean, we lamented having to spend such nice days inside. Yesterday I spent the dinner break perched on the seawall across the street, listening to the sound of the waves crashing against algae-strewn rocks, feeling a light spray on my face, and inhaling the scent of the ocean as the sun dipped towards the horizon, blinding me with reflected light.

The weather didn’t hold. Today the sky is the dull slate gray of an overcast day. It’s as if Viña is telling the 31 players left in the 2013 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Chile National Poker Championship, “Play time’s over. It’s time to get serious.”

What’s on the line today: a berth at tomorrow’s final table and a shot at the grand prize of $184,000. Several players are well-positioned to make that deep run. Victor Shuchleib quietly announced his presence yesterday afternoon, amassing 800,000 chips before anyone even noticed him and 1,486,000 chips by the time anyone got his name. He’s got the pole position for Day 3.

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Mystery man

Joining Shuchleib in the Millionaire’s Club are Ariel Celestino (1,113,000) and Sergio Braga (1,005,000), two guys who’ve seen their share of final tables – this week. Both players made the final table of an $1100 Brazilian Series of Poker event in Iguaçu on Tuesday. Celestino finished in 8th place; Braga fell just short of the win with his runner-up finish. If that’s not motivation to carry this one all the way home, then nothing is.

Joining the three millionaires for Day 3 are 28 other stalwarts who gritted their way through Days 1 and 2. They include the likes of Luis Jaikel (912,000), a man who once played poker with Stu Ungar; Ezequiel Lebed (550,000), who was 2nd in chips after Day 1a; Norson Saho (484,000), chip leader of Day 1b; Leonardo Martins (472,000), a Brazilian player of some skill and renown; and Team PokerStars Pro Jose “Nacho” Barbero (407,000), whose known a bit of success here in Viña – he took down the Enjoy Poker Series Grand Final at this venue in December, a win worth roughly $50,000.

An LAPT win here will be worth three-and-a-half times that amount and would probably ensure that Barbero never attends every event in Viña for the next three years. But that’s getting ahead of things. Today we march on towards the final table.

We’ll find out who gets their place in the sun tomorrow.

Dave Behr is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

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