This year’s WPT Festa al Lago took a different approach then most major tournaments. Instead of splitting the field into two Day 1′s, they decided to allow registration through about half of Day 2. You could register at any point up until the Day 2 cut-off and get the same 60,000 starting stack (so you’re not blinded off). As BJ Nemeth wrote in his tourney recap:

“In retrospect, more than half the field would have been better off starting on Day 2 — only 48% of the field managed to build up a chip stack higher than they started with.”

We further agree with that assessment, as among those planning on starting on Day 2 is Andy Bloch, and you know he spent a week developing theorems and algorithms on when the optimum time to register for such a tournament structure would be. Let’s just put it like this, if we played professionally, and there was a tournament with a structure like the Festa al Lago, we’d let Bloch do all of the homework, call him up the day before the event begins, and be like, “Andy, buddy, pal, when do you think you’re registering…” (it’s just like high school).

Anyway, 195 of the initial 244 remain. As the headline indicates, Mike Matusow ended Day 1 as chip leader, stacked at 224,200. He’s followed by Mark Seif with 222,425. Other notable big stacks include but are certainly not limited to Phil Laak (185,850), Dutch Boyd (176,075), Chino Rheem (172,175), Jonathan Little (162,575), Jennifer Tilly, a woman (139,450), Falcon Heene (138,200), Lee Markholt-Watkinson (122,000), and Justin Bonomo (115,600).

Among those departed include Joe Sebok, the spectacularly-breasted J.C. Tran, Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, Antonio Esfandiari, Darrell “Deep” Dicken, and Daniel Negreanu.

Speaking of Negreanu, read his top WPT R.O.I. blog post here. Should ruffle some feathers.

Get full Festa chip counts here.

Tagged as: Festa Al Lago, Mark Seif, Mike Matusow, Poker News, World Poker Tour

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