Whilst the majority of the poker media’s eyes are focused on the World Series of Poker Main Event, where at the time of writing is currently down to the final 10 players, there is another major tournament going on in a beautiful town called Portoroz, where the Main Event of WPT Slovenia is reaching the late stages.
A slightly lower than expected 141 players parted company with €3,300 in exchange for 30,000 tournament chips and an excellent blind structure that started at just 50/100. Amongst the 141 starters were British contingent John Eames, Toby Lewis and Tom Macdonald, whilst other names from the European circuit such as Dominik Nitsche were also present. Despite these being big names in their own right they do not come much bigger than the infamous Antanas Guoga, better known as Tony G.
Tony G turned up for Day 1b nearly three hours late after only arriving from Venice that day but he still found himself armed with more than 26,000 chips, testament to the aforementioned blind structure. During the course of the day the charismatic Tony G soared as high as 120,000 chips after he got extremely lucky with ace-queen versus the ace-king and pocket kings of two opponents when he flopped a queen and turned another. The rest of the day and Day 2 was not as kind to him though and he ended the Day 2 with 66,600 chips, with blinds now being 1,200/2,400/300a.
Sat atop of the chip counts is Italian Gianluca Speranza who will start the day with 421,700 chips. Speranza won a huge pot that eliminated Lewis earlier in Day 2 and he used this stack to great effect and continually picked up pots. Hot on his heels is Manuel Blaschke who has 393,300 chips, most of which he won from Nitsche. Almost immediately after the restart from the dinner break Nitsche and Blaschke entered a raising war preflop, Nitsche on the button and Blaschke in the big blind, that resulted in Nitsche six-bet shoving a suited ace-ten down the throat of Blaschke’s aces.
Play resumes at 1300 CET and will continue until the final table of six players has been reached. Will Tony G be able to recover and be part of those final six or can one of the two British pros still in the field bring home the bacon just as many have done in Las Vegas this summer? Tune in later to find out.
