Home / Poker News November 2010 / NAPT Los Angeles – Day 1A report
NAPT Los Angeles – Day 1A report
Posted by: James Carter. - Mon, 2010-11-15 09:15
The final stop of the NAPT’s first season kicked off at the Bicycle Casino in LA, attracting a massive starting field of 328 players on its first day 1 flight. There were plenty of big names among the starters too. Greg Raymer was one of the big guns present. Barry Greenstein, Vanessa Selbst, Soi Nguyen and Joseph Cheong were there as well. Antonio Esfandiari, Annette Obrestad and Scott Montgomery joined the chase for the title.
The interesting thing about this group of professional poker players was that not a single one of them managed to survive the first day of action.
Not all of the name players involved were that unlucky though. John Phan shot straight out of the gates at the beginning of the day and he never looked back.
The end of the day found him atop the provisional leaderboard. Lady Luck seemed to have stuck by his side all day long. At one point, he woke up holding pocket rockets on the board of K,4,Q,8,2, while an opponent of his held A,K. The money went into the middle and Phan walked away with the goods. Things eventually turned southward for him, but he still finished with one of the healthiest stacks.
Other players who survived the first day of NAPT action were: Jason Mercier, Justin Bonomo, Eric Baldwin, Gavin Griffin and Chris Klodnicki.
Chad Brown's survival act was probably the most spectacular one of all. He had nursed a short stack through the day, right up to the point when he managed to double up, having flopped a set of Queens rather late in the day.
Nick Grippo was the one who finished the day with the largest stack of chips. He managed to amass 235,100 chips to shoot to the top. Scott Fishman finished second on the provisional leaderboard, followed by Tom Middleton in third.
