Boatman Bags Bunches as Total Entries Nears 1,000
All three starting flights are in the books in partypoker 2018 Caribbean Poker Party $5,300 Main Event, and plenty of work is left to be done if the $10 million guarantee is to be reached. After 451 turned up for Day 1c, the total entries has reached 958, just under half of the total needed.
Of those 451 who played the third starting day, about 275 made it through, consistent with the roughly 60 percent who bagged the first two days at Baha Mar Resort here in The Bahamas.
One of the biggest stacks belongs to Barny Boatman. The English veteran, the subject of a recent feature right here on PokerNews, turned his 1 million starting stack into 5,715,000, a monstrous number considering nobody finished north of 5 million in any of the previous days.
Boatman's already put up one big result in 2018 with a seventh-place finish in the $1,500 Millionaire Maker at the WSOP, good for $175,865. He started off with a nice push early but then made a sprint late, going from 3.5 million to his finishing number in the last hour.
However, as hefty as Boatman's stack is, he still trails at least one player in the counts. Turkey's Mustafa Biz has the unofficial lead with 6,170,000. Biz, who already won a $1K event at partypoker LIVE MILLIONS Germany earlier this year, won a massive pot late with aces over kings late in the day, according to a player at his table. Evidently, both made sets and Biz wound up with the nut flush on the river, where his opponent found a fold.
Darren Keyes (5,065,000), Gianluca Speranza (4,720,000), Joshua Ladines (3,955,000), Jeff Trudeau (3,620,000) and Darren Elias (3,560,000) also had strong Day 1c showings. Speranza finished second in last year's WSOPE Main Event, while Elias looks to add another major title to his record four WPT crowns.
The unique structure of this event still allows plenty of time for entries. That's because not only does a few hours of Day 2 registration remain, but there's actually two different Day 2 options for players to fire on.
Day 2a is the next step for this $10 million guaranteed event, scheduled for a start at noon local time on Tuesday. Players had the option to select their Day 2 if they bagged, and PokerNews will be on hand to cover those who picked Day 2a as blinds head to 10,000/20,000/20,000.