Image by Erik Lucatero Twitter: @erik_lukatero
This year’s Millionaire Maker has its final 9 confirmed with the end of its Day 2. It has been a long time coming for what is ostensibly a three-day event. In reality, the event will have taken up the best part of three weeks by the time a winner is crowned.
The reason for this delay is that the tournament sported 15 Day 1s. The number of those initial flights was chosen to accommodate the scale of the event which in 2019 attracted 8,809 entries.
The hope was most likely that, with the cost of flights and hotel rooms eliminated for the international crowd, they might crack 9k entrant this year.
Day 1 A-O
Unfortunately, the entries dropped significantly. In fact, at 6,299 entries, 2020’s event had the lowest turn out since the Millionaire Maker event was first introduced at the 2013 WSOP.
Still, those 6,299 still generated a prize pool of $8,976,075. Which means that whoever survives from the final 9 will be going home with $1,489,289 as well as some jewelry.
Players started with 50k in chips and played 17 blind levels on Day 1. The 1,041 survivors of the initial flights were then crammed into one online poker room for Day 2 where they played down to the final 9.
Day 2 kicks off
Kenny Hallaert came in hard on Day 2 with the chip lead. In fact, everyone seemed to be playing hard as it took just four blind levels to knock a quarter of the field out. The remaining 764 players were in the money.
Daniel Negreanu and David Haxton were among the bigger names to mount their bikes on Day 2.
The day ended more slowly though with 12 handed play going on for almost a full hour. As a result, the final table has a lot of sub 10 bb stacks.
Dvoress leads the pack
After Day 2 wound down, the current favorite at the final table is Daniel Dvoress, Canada’s #5 ranked player for dollars cashed. Dvoress has a little over $15 million in tourney winnings as of this writing (Aug. 3). And with over a quarter of the chips in play, he is pretty well situated to add another million to that stack.
Dvoress brought Day 2 to a close when he busted Manuel “robocup” Ruivo. Ruivo raised to 24 million from the button with A4os. Dvoress defended his small blind with pocket 9s, raising to 45 million. Ruivo called with what was left of his stack.
The board missed both player’s hands and Ruivo hit the rail, ending Day 2.
Day 3 will play out on Aug. 8 and we will be covering it here.
The lucky finalists and their chip counts are:
- Daniel Dvoress - 92.5 million in chips
- Alejandro “pepealas” Caridad - 64.0 million
- Neville “NevSlater” Endo Costa - 43.1 million
- Michael “MrFabulous” Nugent - 37.0 million
- Anatoly "Mr_Deer" Filatov - 22.5 million
- Tomasz "SushiJanushi" Cybulskiv - 16.6 million
- Aneris "TaiwanNumba1" Adomkevicius - 13.5 million
- Caio "Ez4ENCE" De Almeida - 12.6 million
- Ronny Kaiser - 10.5 million
