HomeHO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – The 1B VND (US$43,000.00) guaranteed prize pool for the NLHE Warm-Up Event was more than tripled as a total of 439 entries of 7M VND (US$301.00) brought the total prize pool to a staggering 3.037B VND (US$132,139.00), marking an auspicious opening day of hostilities for APT Vietnam Ho Chi Minh 2022 at the Saigon Poker Club here.
Flight A alone already drew in 262 entries (with 80 re-entries) while Flight B (which started four hours later and had many alternates due to table congestion) brought in 177 entries (47 re-entries) in what is now the record for most number of entries in an opening day event in APT history, according to APT General Manager and Executive Tournament Director Lloyd Fontillas.
“This is a record,” he said. “We’ve never had this many entries for an opening day event ever in the APT.”
When the smoke cleared, 114 aspirants remained with Flight A having 64 players still in the running while Flight B had 50 coming back for the Final Day of Event #1 which will take place later at 1:00PM (UCT +7).
American Robert Kiss (from Flight A), the 2022 APT Hanoi 2-Day NLHE champion, sits atop the leaderboard with 364,000 in chips, followed by Francis Garson of France with 345,000 while local bet Vinh Pham occupies third with 334,500 in total holdings.
Today (August 9th) also marks the first day of the much anticipated (Event #2) Super High Roller event that has a buy-in of 100M VND (US$43,000.00) as well as (Event #3) the two-day NLHE which has a buy-in of 7M VND (US$301.00), similar to the Warm-Up Event, but with a smaller starting stack of 10,000 chips. Registration for those events begin as early as 1:00PM.
APT tournament personnel are hopeful that they can also have the scheduled satellite to the Main Event today as the one slated on opening day was cancelled due to the influx of participants for both Flights of the Warm-Up Event. The buy-in for the satellite is 2.2M VND (approximately US$95.00). The direct buy-in to the Main Event (which commences on Thursday, August 11th) is 20M VND (US$860.00).
This is the calendar of events in the APT Vietnam Ho Chi Minh 2022.
