2018 PCA Super High Roller Day 1 Results

The much talked about opening event of this year’s PokerStars Caribbean Adventure – the unprecedented $100,000 buy-in Super High Roller tournament – began Thursday morning with three eight-player tables and two seven-player tables. In other words, a total of 38 players (predominately pros with a handful of rich and ambitious amateurs mixed in), ponied up the $100,000 necessary to compete for what amounted to a $3,743,000 prize pool. It will likely be one of the largest prize pools of the tournament, and it’s hard to beat the 1 in 38 odds.

I write this article at midnight, with Day 1 of the Super High Roller event just ended. Thus far, the field has been airtight with only 15 players out. The remaining 23 competitors have fought tooth and nail for the chip lead. Of course the tournament started off on a totally different note, with the first elimination – of Dutch pro Koen Berendsen – happening only 30 minutes into the day when Berendsen went all-in against Nick Schulman pre-flop. When the players revealed their cards, Berendsen was holding pocket kings and Schulman was holding the only hand that could beat them – pocket aces. The flop failed to save Berendsen, sending him to the rail prematurely.

It took more than two hours to eliminate the next player, and in the process another pro bought into the early rounds – the young Swede that many believe is actually Isildur1, Viktor Blom. We’ll get to Blom’s performance later. Back to the second player out, Bill Perkins. Perkins’ painful elimination propelled his opponent Vivek Rajkumar over the 500,000 chip mark, making him the second player to hit the milestone. The other player leading at that time – Nick Schulman – was also sitting at Rajkumar’s table.

Scott Seiver was the next casualty only a few hands later, mucking his losing hand after seeing Phil Laak’s pocket kings. David Baker was the next man out, losing his meager all-in to Masa Kagawa after limping through several hands with a crippled stack. Only 10 minutes later, Kagawa himself lost all but 11,400 chips when he called Bryn Kenney’s all in. Twenty minutes later, Kenney finished the job.

Poker fans that were waiting for a showdown between the Bluff Player of the Year and the CardPlayer Player of the Year (Sorel Mizzi and Tom Marchese, respectively) were no doubt sorely disappointed that the two never got a chance to go head to head. The two were seated at different starting tables, and Marchese was taken out by Jason Mercier in Level 6.

After the 90-minute dinner break, there was a streak of eliminations starting with Bill Chen, then Ashton Griffin, then 2010’s WSOP Main Event winner Jonathan Duhamel, then only 15 minutes later late-starter Viktor Blom. One of the most exciting hands of the tournament was a tense stand-off between the aforementioned Viktor Blom and Daniel Negreanu. Blom won that one, but ultimately it’s Negreanu that’s stood the test of time; as we write this he sits second on the chip count. Humberto Brenes busted next followed by Bertrand Grospellier at the beginning of Level 9.

That’s all she wrote for Day 1 of the Super High Roller event. Day 2 starts at noon on Friday with 23 players remaining. At the end of the night, Tobias Reinkemeier is leading the pack with 896,000 chips, followed closely by Daniel Negreanu with 848,000 and Bryn Kenney with 828,000.

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