blonde poker

Eames and Romanello in the final of event 2

2011 World Series of Poker Europe
Event #2: €1,090 No-Limit Hold'em

Day 2 of the €1,090 "European Stimulus Special" is in the books, and we're down to our final nine.

The day began with 104 hopefuls still in contention, but the eliminations came brutally quick in the early levels. Peter Jetten couldn't make it out of the first hand of the day, though in fairness to him, he only had 6,000 chips when play began. Other early casualties included Dan Shak, Farzad Bonyadi, Richard Toth, and France's newest WPT champion Matt Waxman.

For a while, it looked like we were pushing toward a stacked final table, but the middle levels were equally cruel to the remaining familiar faces. Vanessa Selbst had her queens cracked by ace-queen to all but end her day, and she followed her pal Kevin MacPhee out the door with a middling cash. Other notables to fall by the wayside with small cashes were McLean Karr, Tyler Kenney, Nicolas Chouity, Toby Lewis, Dan Kelly, and November Niner Eoghan O'Dea.

That leaves us with just nine, and it's Italy's Gianluca Speranza out in front with 757,000. He'll have to deal with a tough cast of characters, and Andrew Hinrichsen might be the betting favorite with one day left. He begins in second place with 434,000, and he's followed by another tough player, Roberto Romanello. The Welshman had an above-average stack for the bulk of the day, but a late clash with Speranza cost him nearly half his stack.

The end-of-day chip counts are posted below

1    Gianluca Speranza    757,000
2    Andrew Hinrichsen    434,000
3    Roberto Romanello    253,000
4    Nabil Nedjai    250,500
5    Eric Baudry    232,000
6    Tarcisio Bruno    153,500
7    John Eames    106,500
8    Gregory Lejolivet    95,000
9    Bernard Guigon    53,000


1          148,030
2          91,262
3          67,281
4          50,146
5          37,874
6          28,977
7          22,449
8          17,608
9          13,982