Home / Poker News January 2012 / 2012 PCA Super High Roller – Day 1 Report
2012 PCA Super High Roller – Day 1 Report
Posted by: James Carter. - Sat, 2012-01-07 01:19
Having entered its 9th year, the
PCA has yet again kicked off at the Atlantis Resort and Casino the other day and what a start it was. The organizers cut right to the chase by pushing the $100k Super High Roller event out front. Given the size of the buy-in, an impressive number of 30 players showed up for the official start of the PCA hostilities. Two of these guys chose to re-enter later, so the official tally on entries was 32 at the end of the day. The prize-pool which resulted was a $3,136,000 one, enough to give the eventual winner a $1,254,400 reward.
Obviously, given the nature of the event, the participants were pretty much all high profile professionals. Isaac Haxton managed to get the better of the starting field for the day, finishing atop the provisional chip counts with 1.24 million chips to his name.
Haxton got going early and he rode that momentum right into the lead. He grabbed the lead as early as the second level and never let it slip from his grasp. The pot which propelled his stack to the top came about in a hand in which PokerStars’ Viktor Blom and Jonathan Duhamel also took part. Uncharacteristically, Blom got out of the way early, so it came down to Duhamel and Haxton trading blows back and forth till they got it all into the middle. Haxton was holding a pair of Qs against Duhamel’s A,K and the classic coin-flip was on. The board fell a bunch of bricks and Haxton’s ladies held fast, sending Duhamel to the desk to pony up another entry.
Haxton didn’t congratulate himself too much though. A tad later, he swung into action again, eliminating Justin Smith and picking up another massive pot in the process. The hand went down in much the same way as the previous one: Haxton had pocket Js against Smith’s A,K for the flip and his pocket pair held up again.
Erik Seidel had a decent start to his tournament as well.
