29 Sep 2009

Poker Review: Munns Leading After Day Two

Dave Allan sends us over his latest update on WSOPE after a busy few days.

We're down to under 100 players for the WSOPE main event and things are starting to take shape rather nicely at The Casino at Empire in London's Leicester Square. While some of the big names consolidated their strong position yesterday, one player came out of the pack to take a dominating chip lead. Ian Munns ended the day with over 500,000 chips which represented a lead of over 200,000 to the man in second place, Praz Bansi.

Munns' impressive Day 2 was one of the highlights of the day but it's impossible to ignore some of the names in the chasing pack, specifically Doyle Brunson in 6th place. 76 year old "Texas Dolly" has 10 WSOP bracelets to his name in a career which spans several decades and a WSOPE bracelet would seem fitting for a man synonymous with the World Series of Poker events. Brunson isn't the only big name chasing Munns at this stage. Hendon Mobster Ram Vaswani is also near the top of the chip counts with James Akenhead and Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott also looking in threatening form.

Betfair Poker's John Tabatabai carried his good Day 1 form into Day 2 and looks comfortable in the top half of the field with 160,000 chips. Annette Obrestad is still well in contention too with 90,000 chips to her name. Annette will be buoyed by her European team victory in the Caesars Cup over Daniel Negreanu's Americas team. Negreanu hasn't exploded into life yet but with 113,000 chips he still looks a huge danger to the rest of the field.

After a strong looking opening day for Noah Boeken, Day 2 turned out to be a huge disappointment for the young Dutch star. Boeken joins Ian Frazer, Karl Mahrenholz, Mike Matusow, Phil Hellmuth and Barry Greenstein on the list of players who won't be winning the WSOPE main event bracelet this year after their respective eliminations yesterday.

The top ten players and their chip counts going into Day 3 are:

Ian Munns - 528300
Praz Bansi - 299000
Oyvind Riisem - 255300
Amnon Filippi - 216500
David Docherty - 216200
Doyle Brunson - 210900
Sandor Demjan - 209000
Markus Ristola - 205000
Ram Vaswani - 202500
Jason Mercier - 202300

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