94 players return for Championships Event Day 2; Paul Hong bags the biggest at Day 1B

The APT Vietnam Ho Chi Minh Championships 2018 – Championships Event – resumes today with 94 players returning to Pro Poker Club for the next stage to the coveted title. Over the past two days, the VND 33,000,000 buy-in highlight tournament drew in a total of 213 entries – 74 (Day 1A) and 139 (Day 1B) – to generate another juicy prize pool worth VND 6,198,300,000. Though it is still two days coming, the eventual winner will pocket a sweet wad of VND 1,304,030,000. (View in Vietnamese)

Today’s race opens at Level 11 blinds 1K-2K ante 300. Average stack is 113,300 with 10,650,000 total chips in play. Unlike the starting days, Day 2 will only play a total of 8 rounds, bagging up at the end of Level 18. You can view the chips counts and seat draw in the APT Facebook page.

Entering as front-runners are the top four players of Day 1A, Nguyen Van Canh – 353,600, Vaness Kim aka Tran Trung Hieu – 334,400, Linh Tran – 316,500, and Tetsuya Tsuchikawa – 307,600. In fifth rank is Day 1B chip leader, Paul Hong with 267,700.

Other notable players headed back at the felt include APT major title-holders:

Kit Kwan Kwok – 127,900
Soo Jo Kim – 70,300
Huy Pham – 160,100
Iori Yogo – 47,700
Choong Kian Weng – 28,000

Also into Day 2 is the only two-time series winner Gavin Flynn with 45,000.

Action gets underway at 1pm. There is a chance we will see the money bubble burst with the top 36 places paid. To keep you updated on the action at the tables, we will have Live Updates posted throughout the day.

Day 1B closes with Paul Hong leading the 70 survivors

At yesterday’s final entry flight, a total of 107 players attended with 32 of them re-entering for 139 total entries. By the end of the scheduled 10 rounds, half remained – 70 players – with New Zealand’s Paul Hong bagging up the chip lead of 267,700.  To help Hong amass his big stack, midway through he knocked out two players simultaneously with J-J staying ahead of A-10 and A-Q

Paul Hong

Another player packing up a hefty stack was Vietnam’s Le Ngoc Khanh with 259,800 in chips.

Le Ngoc Khanh

This starting heat also saw four APT major title-holders make it through, Iori Yogo, Kit Kwan Kwok, Huy Pham, and Choong Kian Weng.

All of the Day 1B survivors will merge with those from Day 1A taking place today, Friday, July 20 starting at 1pm. You can view the Day 1B chip counts in the APT Facebook page. 

APT Player of the Series update

With seven of the events already wrapped up, you can now view the APT Player of the Series standings. The top 5 race leaders are: 

Dang Xuan Canh – 968.39 points
Norbert Koh – 757.06 points
Minh Le – 695.95 points
Gavin Flynn – 680.67 points
Cao Ngo Anh – 532.37 points

Click APT Player of the Series for the race mechanics.