The Main Event dominated yesterday’s poker at the Royal Dublin Society – and how!! Less than five hours into Day 1c of the €1,150 buy-in, €1 million guaranteed Main Event, we smashed through the record set last year (having also cruised through the €1 million guarantee the day before). Every Day 1 this year has been a record-breaker, entry numbers boosted by 800+ players who qualified online on PokerStars and Paddy Power and in live satellites at the venue and casinos worldwide.
Day 1c of the €1,150 Main Event attracted the most entries out of any of them with 1,459 entries. That was the biggest ever single starting flight at the Irish Open (and would have topped the total number of Main Event entries up until 2018). The final Day 1d turbo last night attracted another 562 hopefuls and brought the total number of entries to 3,233. The total prize pool is a phenomenal €3,152,175. The winner will get €415,615 with 479 spots paid and €1,760 for a min cash.
A total of 743 players started Day 2 of the Main Event but now whittled down to about 580. Dutch player Henk Pol was the Day 2 chip leader on (at that point) 426,500. Ireland’s Simon Maher was in second place with 415,000 chips. The Day 2 field also included a whole bunch of PokerStars luminaries including Fintan Hand (252,000), Georgina James (173,500), Benjamin Spragg (105,000), Sebastian Huber (85,000), and €5,000 High Roller winner Parker Talbot (34,000) while Paddy Power’s Twitch Ambassador Conor O’Driscoll (88,000) was a Day 2 starter but now out.
Other notables who were still in contention at noon included Ankit Ahuja (280,000), The Club’s Adam McKola (third at UKIPT Brighton) (229,500), Ilari Sahamies (209,500), WCOOP record-breaker Benny Glaser (205,000), Juha Helppi (192,000), Luca Pagano (172,500), EPT Prague runner-up Jon Kyte (151,000), Irish poker legend Padraig Parkinson (178,000) and Triple Crown winner Niall Farrell (142,500). Other Day 2 starters: WSOP Online International Ladies Championship winner Jessica Marks (129,000), Sunday Million champ Vanessa Kade (51,000), Alex O’Brien – author of The Truth Detective (37,000), Friends of the Irish Open Brian Morgan (144,000) and Elizabeth Bennett-Martin (65,000) and WSOP Ladies runner-up Debs “the Destroyer” Worley-Roberts (73,500).
Hats off to Kyle O’Connor who freerolled into a €1 Paddy Power promotion during the Cheltenham Festival to win his seat for nothing at all. He started Day 2 with 215,000 as hopefully still in. Raymond Masters also got through to Day 2 – he won his seat in the same Cheltenham promo but had to fork out a whole euro to enter.
Full coverage for Day 2 is on https://www.pokernews.com/tours/io/2024-irish-open/1-150-main-event and the live stream starts shortly and will be running from 12.30pm today right through to the end of Monday’s final. The award-winning PokerStars Live team – Stapes, James Hartigan and 2017 Main Event Champ Griffin Benger – are all on the mic for your listening pleasure. All webcast sessions include players’ hole cards so streaming is always subject to a 30-minute security delay. Do remember that the clocks go forward tonight (hurrah – beginning of summer!) so don’t forget to update your timepieces!) You can watch the stream in myriad places – our YouTube channel, the PokerStars YouTube channel, the PokerStars Twitch channel and the PokerStars LIVE Facebook page.
