WSOP Report Day #18 - Bonomo, Bicknell and Kaverman Survive Shootout Day 1 & Mash is Still Mashing

With seven events taking place across Day #18 of the 2019 World Series of Poker, three of those events produced bracelet winners as Saturday crowned a trio of champions. That wasn’t all that went down at the felt, however, as there was drama in a Shootout, Seniors extending into an extra day and big names proving they know how to use a double-stack.

BIG NAMES RULE THE SHOOTOUT

With 40 players progressing from Round 1 of the WSOP $3,000 Shootout event, Justin Bonomo, Kristen Bicknell and James Obst were just three of the names who will be planning to go one step further and make the final after tomorrow’s Day 2.

Pavel Plesuv technically has more chips than anyone else, with 159,000 to his name, but everyone has 150,000 or more given the nature of the event, and other crowd pleasers such as Byron Kaverman, Taylor Paur, Alexandru Papazian, Andrew ‘Chewy’ Lichtenberger and Ryan Leng all made it through. The latter outlasted a table stacked with WSOP experience, including perhaps the player who draws the biggest crowd of anyone at the Rio, Phil Ivey.

Leng stopped Ivey at the heads-up stage to win a guaranteed $6,099 and put himself in the position where he’s two table wins away from $207,193 and the gold WSOP bracelet.

MASH STILL CRUSHING SENIORS

There are just 19 players left in the $1,000 Seniors No-Limit Hold’em Championship, and just like yesterday, it’s Howard Mash who had the big potatoes come close of play. With 13,990,000 chips, Mash edged ahead of Jean-René Fontaine (12,250,000) and Farhad Jamasi (10,425,000) by the time players were bagging up.

Others to survive the day included Dennis Brand (9,045,000), James McNurlan (8,800,000), Adam Richardson (7,975,000) and Roger Stewart (7,105,000), while many more busted, as 252 players were reduced by more than 90% of their number. Layne Flack, Barry Greenstein and Victor Ramdin all managed to make the money but not the overnight chipcounts.

DOUBLE-STACKERS INCLUDE NEGREANU, HELLMUTH AND CLOUTIER

Costing just $1,000 to enter, the double stack event has captured the imagination of everyone involved, including some great names from WSOP history. Juan Esirviez (530,000) holds the chip lead overnight, ahead of Sunny Chattha (478,000), Imran Mukati (432,300) and Scott Clements (305,000) among others. British high roller Jack Sinclair (260,500) also survived, while Daniel Negreanu (251,200), T.J. Cloutier (150,800) both piled up above-average stacks.

Plenty of others survived the day but held less than the average stack, such as Bill Klein, 2018 event winner Robert Peacock and former WSOP Main Event champions Phil Hellmuth, Jamie Gold, Scotty Nguyen and Chris Ferguson. They’ll all return to blinds of 1,000/2,000 with the average stacks currently at 106,816 (53 big blinds). Of the 2,327 players who have made it so far, only 933 will net a guaranteed minimum cash of $1,499, but they’ll all be fighting hard to win the top prize of $687,782. With 6,214 players entering the event, hopefuls such as Ebony Kenney, Men Nguyen and Anthony Zinno all failed to hold onto their chips.

FRIEDMAN SHOOTING FOR BACK-TO-BACK

With 122 entries in total, Adam Friedman, who won the $10k Dealer’s Choice event in 2018, is still involved with just 11 players left, and better than that, he’s the chip leader.

Going for the $312,417 top prize on Sunday, Friedman’s chip stack of 1,289,000, will be under threat from Michael McKenna (1,150,000) and Shaun Deeb (1,002,000), both of whom run him close in the counts and will be hoping their own experience tells when the cards are in the air.

Who’ll win WSOP gold today and become the latest bracelet winner at the 2019 World Series of Poker? Watch the action unfold live today on PokerGO and CBS All Access as more coverage of the 2019 WSOP bracelet events takes place. Selected bracelet events will be streamed exclusively on CBS All Access in the United States.