WPT Super High Roller, Day 1 Recap

By BJ Nemeth

The WPT Super High Roller trophy will go to the winner of this 3-day $100,000 buy-in event.

Day 1 attracted 26 players to the WPT Super High Roller, and six of them took advantage of the re-entry to create a field size of 32 entrants. Registration remains open until shortly after the start of Day 2, so the field size (and the prizepool) could continue to grow.

Dan Smith is on a hot streak, winning three €5,000 events in Monte Carlo last month, and a $100,000 super high roller in Australia back in January. Smith will try to continue his Seidel-like streak here in the WPT Super High Roller.

Speaking of Erik Seidel (left), he won this event last year to cap off an amazing five-month run of success in high-roller events, with three victories and two top-four finishes. Not only that, but he also won the NBC National Heads-Up Championship and finished second in the WPT Hollywood Poker Open.

In this photo, Seidel play a pot against Masa Kagawa (right), while John Juanda, Isaac Haxton, and Justin Bonomo look on.

Jason Mercier was one of the six players who re-entered this event, investing $200,000. The others were Daniel Negreanu, Galen Hall, Tom Marchese, Andrew Robl, and Cary Katz. Neither Negreanu or Hall survived to Day 2.

Tom Marchese was eliminated shortly after the dinner break, but re-entered and had much more success, finishing third in chips with 1,076,000.

Justin Bonomo (right) won a pot worth more than a million in chips during the last level when he got it all in preflop with [AhKh] and cracked the [AdAs] of Erik Seidel (left). Bonomo flopped a flush to double up, and carried that momentum to finish Day 1 with a chipleading stack of 1,433,000.

At the end of Day 1, there were 19 players remaining, with an average chip count around 675,000. Here is a look at the top of the leaderboard:

1.  Justin Bonomo  –  1,433,000
2.  Jean Noel Thorel  –  1,214,000
3.  Tom Marchese  –  1,076,000
4.  Dan Smith  –  913,000
5.  Sam Trickett  –  890,000

Day 2 begins Thursday at 1:00 pm PT, and registration will be open until about 1:15 pm. The official prizepool information will be available shortly after registration close. The field will play down to the final six players for Friday’s televised WPT Final Table, and you can follow the action right here on WPT.com.