The 2014 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) High Roller event commenced on Sunday, hosted at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, where it has been hosted every January to kick off the year over the last several years.
It should go without saying that the PCA is one of the first and most popular events on the poker calendar especially for American online pros who are under the age of 21. Many of the younger breed of players aren’t legally able to play in Las Vegas, so the PCA is an attractive option and one of the events they have marked as attending.
Back to the $100,000 Super High Rollers tournament, which is one of the richest tournaments outside of Las Vegas, attracting all the high stakes pros and rich businessman like Guy Laliberte. You can expect to find many notable players in the field including 2013 WSOP ME Champion Ryan Riess, GPI Player of the Decade, Daniel Negreanu, Team PokerStars pro Isaac Haxton, just to name a few recognizable faces. It’s one of those fields where pretty much every player is recognizable, especially to online players that follow the online high stakes action.
With re-entries allowed, which is hard to grasp for such a ridiculously high buy-in tournament, it created some exciting action, but that didn’t prevent Daniel Negreanu from busting out and being sent to the rail along with several others that were hit with the same bad news after re-entering including Antonio Esfandiari, Igor Kurganov, and Tobias Reinkemeier.
Unfortunately for 2013 WSOP ME champion, Ryan Riess, who was playing his first ever Super High Roller event, his run good was not destined to continue after his phenomenal run during the WSOP main event just last November, and he was another player to have busted out early, and is yet to re-enter.
At the end of the first day of play the overall chip leader was 2013 EPT London Super High Roller champion Martin Finger, who ended the day with 829K in chips. He wasn’t the only player to have had a good Day 1 at this year’s PCA High Roller Event. The 2013 EPT Grand Final Super High Roller champion Max Altergott finished the day with a bit more than 700K in chips. Both Isaac Haxton and Justin Bonomo had more than 500K in chips to work with leading into Day 2 of the event.
Scott Seiver, who is looking to defend his title from last year, is also one of the survivors from Day 1, albeit only with 131K in chips, which puts him close to the bottom of the leaderboard. Given the tremendous amount of success Seiver has had on the live tournament success, you can never count him out though.
When play commences on Day 2 of the PCA High Rollers event at the Atlantis Resort the blind levels will have reached Level 11 where the blinds are at 5K/10K with a 1K ante, which means players buying in for a 250K starting stack will have around 25 big blinds to work with.
Fifty-two players entered the tournament on Day 1 of the event, which came close to the record that was set last year when there were fifty-nine total entrants. However, this number looks as though it will likely increase as there will be other players looking to make it in the money with the event well and truly underway. There has been suggestion that Daniel Negreanu being on the run he has been on will fire a third bullet on Day 2 so expect to still see him in action at the start of play tomorrow, which is noon local time.