Lauri "Lateski" Varonen Takes Day 1 Chip Lead of SCOOP-40-H: $5,200 PLO
Day 1 of the PokerStars 2020 Spring Championship of Online Poker 40-H: $5,200 PLO [6-Max] has come to an end with 19 players making it through to Day. There were 94 unique entries reentering 56 times to create 150 entries in total to reach the $750,000 guaranteed prize pool. All 19 players are already guaranteed $11,047 but will all return to battle it out for that first-place prize of $152,011.
Claiming the Day 1 chip lead is Lauri "Lateski" Varonen with 2,780,996 in chips. Varonen already has a COOP title in possession when he won the $2,100 Hold'em tournament during WCOOP in 2014 but doesn't have a SCOOP one yet. Will this be the one where he claims his first SCOOP title? Varonen is followed by "kjunia" in the counts with 2,570,719. "kjunia" is no stranger to the tournaments with a bigger buy-in with several mentions for them in the recaps of High Rollers and Super Tuesdays. They look to have been around since 2011 with their first cashes recorded back then.
Third in the chip counts is another well-known player: Ignat "0Human0" Liviu with 1,214,973 in chips. Liviu is also know from playing the high stakes cash games and also started playing live tournaments in the past years. Completing the top five are "vovo_leo" (1,064,056) and "soldatikk" with 970,574.
But also keep your eye on "WRUUUM", Connor "blanconegro" Drinan, Talal "raidalot" Shakerchi, Ola "Odd_Oddsen" Amundsgard, and Gavin "gavz101" Cochrane although the latter will be returning to the tables as the short stack with 154,549 in chips. Another name which has been seen a lot during this year's SCOOP are "EEE27" and /"KissMyAcePlz".
Day 1 Action
The day started with ten players in their online "seats" but that number climbed up quite quickly. "kjunia" might have ended second in the counts, their start of the day didn't go too well as they were the first player to bust on the day to Niklas "Lena900" Astedt. Luckily, they only needed one more bullet today. This wasn't the case for players like Yuri "theNERDguy" Martins, Joni "bustoville" Jouhkimainen, Patrick "pads1161" Leonard, Andras "probirs" Nemeth, Laszlo "omaha4rollz" Bujtas, Belarmino “PaGaOVelhinho” de Souza and Astedt who all used three bullets and didn't manage to hit their cards on the board in the end.
Benny "RunGodLike" Glaser tried his luck in this tournament too but gave up after his first bullet when he was eliminated by Amundsgard. When the registration closed, the dust started to clear. Mustapha "lasagnaaammm" Kanit fell to "WRUUUM", Ludovic "ludovi333" Geilich ran into Alexey "LuckyGump" Makarov's full house, and Christopher "lissi stinkt" Frank was eliminated by Amundsgard too.
This went on until the final break when there were 21 players left, things started to slow down with the short stacks managing to double or avoid elimination by other players' raises. In the end, "TheBrodie5" busted to "KissMyAcePlz" to get the field down to 20. "rickv17" would become the bubble when they got their last seven blinds in with ace-ace-ten-trey against the king-five-trey-trey of Varonen. But the board would run out eight-seven-six-seven-four to give Varonen the straight to end the tournament for today.
Day 2 Plan
When the players return, they will finish Level 21 which has a small blind of 10,000 and big blind of 20,000. Level duration will remain at 20 minutes until Level 37. Play will resume at 1 p.m. EST on May 10 and continue until someone walks away with the title and the first-place prize that comes with it.
The PokerNews live reporting team will be there from the start until the final pot has been awarded so make sure to follow along.