Day 1 of the Asia Championship of Poker (ACOP) High Roller Event has come to a close with the field of 34 runners reduced to 15 survivors at the end of seven levels of play.
It was a star-studded affair with the players adding an additional nine rebuys to form a prize pool in excess of $10 million. Only five of those will actually share in those spoils so there's still a bit of work to be done tomorrow.
Russian high-stakes player Vladimir Troyanovskiy was a dominant force throughout the day but a late clash with Brandon Meyers on the last hand of the night switched things up at the top of the chip count leaderboard.
The board read [8s][td][ah][js][5h] with heavy action forcing Predrag Lekovic to fold a set as Troyanovskiy found his [9d][7d] straight pipped by Meyers' [kd][qd] Broadway straight.
Meyers claimed the chip lead with 1,748,000 million with Troyanovskiy next best with 1,398,000. Australian Jeff Rossiter is the only other player above one million after he dispatched of Team PokerStars Pro Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier. It was Rossiter's ace-queen needing help against ElkY's pocket kings and that's exactly what happened when an ace from space hit the river.
Others to survive the day include Team PokerStars Pro Eugene Katchalov, Full Tilt ambassador and defending champion Jonathan Karamalikis, as well as Aidan Tam, Paul Newey, Kyle Cheong and Winfred Yu. Check out the Live Updates section for more details from the day's action as well as chip counts and seating draw for the remaining players.
They'll be back at 2:00pm Sunday (GMT+8) to battle for the Spadie and HK$4,086,700 first place prize, and we'll be here again to provide you with all the action from the Asia Championship of Poker. See you then!
Heath "TassieDevil" Chick is a Freelance Contributor for the PokerStars Blog.