San Remo, Seminole and Caesars Day 2

If there was any doubt that we’re now in the midst of the busiest part of the live tournament season, then this weekend should resolve it. Apart from the ongoing Black Friday news, the headlines have been dominated almost exclusively by three different Main Events that are scheduled to run through this weekend. Those tournaments are: EPT San Remo, WPT Seminole Showdown and WSOP-C Caesars Palace.

All three of the week’s big tour stops have concluded the Day 2 action of their Main Events. The good news is that all three tournaments attracted strong numbers and equally strong players. The WPT Seminole Showdown drew a field of 438 compared to 448 players for the WSOP-C Caesars Main Event (a 16% increase over last year’s numbers). Finally, the EPT San Remo easily edged out the American tournaments with 987 entries. The competition on all counts was so good it would be impossible for us to fairly cover just one. For that reason, we’re including overviews of all three Day 2s.

We’ll start with the WPT’s Seminole Hard Rock Showdown. The Main Event’s late registration encouraged some last minute entries which resulted in a relatively large field of 145 at the end of Day 2. Still, some pretty noteworthy pros – including Joe Tehan and Kathy Liebert – failed to survive. Todd Terry had much better luck, leading the pack going into Day 3, but only by a slim margin of around 20,000 chips. Also in the top ten is Annette Obrestad and Jason Koon (sitting behind the eighth and ninth stacks respectively).

Moving on to Day 2 at the Caesars Palace WSOP-C stop, they had a far more vicious day of play, breaking the field down to the final ten going into tomorrow. Coming into Day 2, chip leader Cody Slaubaugh had enough ammunition to sail through to the final table, and yet his aggressive style backfired and saw him eliminated relatively early in the day. The new chipleader going into Day 3 is Chris Johnson with 1.6 million chips, though a full half of the final table is currently over the million mark.

Finally, the EPT San Remo Main Event’s numbers were so good that their Day 2 field was larger than either of the WSOP-C or WPT Main Events’ Day 1 totals. Altogether 460 players sat down for Day 2 of the event, but only 164 still had seats going into Day 3. The mood is tense since only 144 of those Day 3 competitors will receive a paycheck. Leading a stacked Day 3 field on Saturday will be Georgios Manousos who will no doubt having a hard time holding onto the top spot with five previous EPT winners still remaining in addition to other notable survivors like Joe Cada and Vanessa Selbst.

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