Home / Poker News February 2010 / LA Poker Classic – Day 1 report
LA Poker Classic – Day 1 report
Posted by: Randy Williams - Sun, 2010-02-28 23:47
These days, we’re witnessing a genuine poker explosion all over: the online poker scene is bustling. Online poker tournaments are breaking attendance and prize-pool records and all this while the online nosebleed cash games are in full swing too. The live poker scene is busy as well. The WPT’s LA Poker Classic is only one of several high profile live events currently underway.
This
poker tournament marked an extremely interesting prop-bet between Jeff Madsen, Joe Sebok and Gavin Smith. The first player of the three to bite the dust would have to get tattoos depicting the faces of the other two guys. The second to the rail would have to get a tattoo of the face of the guy left standing.
Sebok proved to be the unluckiest of the three as he got bounced during the 3rd level when his pocket rockets fell to a lesser hand.
Jeff Madsen, fresh of his Borgata win was the second of the three to go. Both losers would end up with Gavin Smith’s face tattooed on. Although there was a possibility for the losers to buy their way out of the tattoo deal, no word of either of them opting for that possibility has yet surfaced.
Gavin Smith was obviously the happiest of them all. Not only did he escape the permanent scarring of his skin, he made it through to day 2 too, albeit on a really short stack of 4,500 chips. According to his Twitter page, he went card-dead during the later stages of day 1.
Two players who did really good and who didn’t even have to worry about some poker player’s mug-shot being permanently etched into their Adam’s suits were Masa Kagawa and Mark Seif. They finished day 1 of the poker tournament in 1st and second respectively. They bested an initial field of 745 players whose combined buy-ins gave birth to a $1,778,001 first place prize and a $1,002,710 second place one. A total of 463 players survived day 1.
Other notable players to bite the dust were: last year’s champ, Cornel Andrei Cimpan, and PokerStars’ Peter Eastgate and Andy Bloch.
Paul Wasicka, Darus Sucharto and Vanessa Rousso survived to day two, so
Team PokerStars pro will still enjoy a healthy representation.
