Home / Poker News May 2009 / Bruno Fitoussi leads WSOP Event #2 after Day 1
Bruno Fitoussi leads WSOP Event #2 after Day 1
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2009-05-29 18:57
The 40th Anniversary $40,000 NL Holdem Event of the 2009 WSOP kicked off yesterday, drawing a field of 201 players.
The high buy-in was meant to restrict participation to those who could afford to put that much money into an opening event and thus to attract the cream of the crop, the players most likely to succeed in any of the 54 side events still ahead. The organizers more than met their goals with this one. There were no fewer than 50 gold bracelet owners in the field, among them names like Doyle Brunson, Peter Eastgate, the winner of last year’s Main Event, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Tom Dwan, John Juanda, Phil Ivey and Chris Moneymaker.
Play started off on the slow side, as everyone was deep-stacked and nobody was in a hurry to put his/her tournament life on the line early. Still, by the end of the day, the field of 201 whittled down to 89, as Bruno Fitoussi clinched the provisional chip lead.
There was no shortage of skill in this field and coupled with the deep starting stacks, that meant that only 5 players bit the dust before the first break. Jim Bechtel was one of the 5 guys who hit the rail early.
He got his pocket rockets cracked on a flop of 9,2,2. Three players saw the flop and David Chiu took matters into hand with a bet. Bechtel called it to see a 6 fall on the turn. That was the card that drew all the money in, and Chiu showed pocket 9s for a set. The 3 on the river changed nothing and Bechtel was done.
John Juanda and Daniel Negreanu were also among the early casualties, and haunted by bad luck, Tom “durrrr” Dwan too failed to get anything going.
Peter Eastgate soon headed to the rail himself, eliminated by Charles Lehr. There was little shame in getting up and going though as he was joined shortly by Johnny Chan, Annie Duke, David Benyamine, Erick Lindgren and Yevgeniy Timoshenko.
Bruno Fitoussi was largely unfazed by all the notorious eliminations though. He kept focused and kept accumulating chips all through the day. When the day was called, he stood atop the chip leaderboard. Among the survivors were Mike Matusow, Huck Seed, Tony G, Ted Forrest and Doyle Brunson.
