The 2024 WSOP Paradise festival kicked off on Friday night, and one of the main attractions started today with a bang.
The Triton Million saw 74 players sit down and pay $500,000 each – 37 VIPs and 37 pros that they invited to the party. The invitational format is a regular on the Triton circuit, but this is the first time there's been a bracelet waiting at the end.
It's a fascinating format, not least because half of the field is generally pretty inexperienced, compared to the pro wizards who stalk the Tritons. And inexperienced, rich VIPs can make far-from-GTO plays.
Even so, we weren't expecting one of them to lose their 1,000,000 stack on the very first hand of play. That's what David Einhorn managed to do, setting fire to his $500,000 buy-in by six-betting 
preflop. What's worse for the rest of the VIP field (they play apart from the pros on Day 1), is that he dusted his stack off to probably the best player in their ranks, Jared Bleznick. His hand? Aces, of course.
The board ran out 
, giving Einhorn a glimmer of a sweat for his half million dollars, but no miracle.
The good thing about being rich, though, is that you can buy back into this event once for another $500,000, which is what Einhorn has done. And he's lasted more than one hand.
You can hear Bleznick talk about how the hand went down in the video below.
Bleznick now in commanding position
Some people might be wondering how Bleznick managed to wrangle a seat in the VIP half of the draw. It's a good question. He has other business interests, but he also has over $8M in tournament winnings, a bracelet, and he just beat Patrik Antonius over three High Stakes Duels on PokerGO, netting him a cool $700,000. A novice, he isn't.
He also effectively started this tournament with double the stack of anyone else, thanks to Einhorn. If he was dangerous before, he's going to be very hard to stop now.
At the time of writing, Bleznick is still overall chip leader with 1,900,000, with Jason Koon (1,800,000), Alfred Decarolis (1,600,000) and Artur Martirosian (1,300,000) just behind. Daniel Negreanu is down to 788,000 and Alex Foxen is the shortest stack with 483,000.
PokerOrg is in the Bahamas and bringing you all the action from the Triton Million and every other event at Paradise over on Instant, where you'll also find the live stream from this and the other major WSOP paradise events. You can watch the stream while getting all the behind-the-scenes action and big hands from the outer tables on Instant (where we will also honor the delay on the stream).
