Home / Poker News February 2010 / LAPT Punta del Este – Day 1 report
LAPT Punta del Este – Day 1 report
Posted by: Jo Martin - Thu, 2010-02-25 17:54
The PokerStars sponsored LAPT’s second stop kicked off yesterday at Punta del Este in Uruguay. The event attracted a field of 307 participants, and given the $3,500+$200 buy-in, the first place prize was set to $279,330.
Day 1 saw the field wade through 8 levels of blinds. At the end of it all, half the initial starting field was gone. With 145 contenders remaining in the books, it was Martin Fuentes who clinched the top spot, with 118k chips to his name.
Fuentes began the day well. During the first few levels he inconspicuously built up an 80,000 chip stack. His final push came within the last few hands of the day, when he took his already impressive stack to the top of the provisional chip leader board. That big thrust came at the end of an A,A vs Q,Q match-up, which Fuentes’ rockets won by hitting another A on the flop.
Cesar F. Mostafa and Ernesto Panno played well too. They’d both built stacks within 10k of Furentes’ pack-leading one.
Like any PokerStars sponsored event, this
poker tournament attracted a high number of “name” players too, and many of these guys survived the first day of action. Humberto Brenes brought half his family along for the trip. While he managed to survive Day1, his two sons, Roberto and Jose Humberto both fell by the side.
Jose Ignacio Barbero, Leo Fernandez and Veronica Dabul will continue to represent
PokerStars on Day 2 of the event.
PokerStars pros who got bounced on Day 1 were: Angle Guillen, Pieter de Korver, Alexandre Gomes and Andre Akkari.
Maria Mayrinck, another Team PokerStars pro managed to survive the day despite an early trouncing that left her with 15k chips. The hand that drove her to the edge of extinction was a typical “perfect hand”. Maria made a straight against an opponent’s boat to drop a cartload of chips early on. Fortunately for the PokerStars pro, her 15,000 chips proved enough for her to build on, and soon she doubled back up. She hit top pair top kicker and got all-in on it against an opponents straight and flush draws. Soon after that, she chipped up again via a top pair-top kicker against another flush draw.
She finished Day 1 with 41,300 chips.
