PokerStars Festival Bucharest: Solyom bags Day 2 lead, Grafton still in the hunt

River cards, eh? Where would we be without them in No Limit Hold’em tournaments? Forever stuck on the turn, that’s where. Infinitely taking turns to take a turn for the worse until the tides start to turn.

So thank heavens for the river cards. They bring a sense of closure and purpose to proceedings. But they also deliver brutal bad beats, and we saw two of those today here on Day 2 of the PokerStars Festival Bucharest Main Event.

We’ll get to them later. First, allow me to introduce you to the overnight chip leader heading into Day 3: Nandor Solyom. He was the first player to hit the one million chip mark today, and rode that lead to end the night with 1.46 million.

Only 58 players now remain from the 326 we started with, after eight 60-minute levels were played. Solyom’s not alone at the top of the counts though; Daniel Nietrzebka (1.43 million) and Yuriy Kudrynskyy (805,000) both bagged big stacks too.

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Day 1A chip leader Tamas Kabatnic and Day 1B chip leader Stefan Fabian both had excellent days, continuing their good form. The two Romanians obviously had big-stack advantages from the off, but they managed to put it to use and ended with 233,000 (Kabatnic) and 344,000 (Fabian), respectively.

Sam ‘TheSquid’ Grafton is still alive and well. After some difficult periods which saw him hovering around the 20 big blind mark, he managed to bag up 344,000 to take into tomorrow. And lest we forget, defending champ Avishai Shitrit was still in with a shot of going to back to back in Bucharest. However, the Eureka6 champ would ultimately bust in the last level of the day.

Spare a thought for Petre Ionescu, too. When 112 players were left they all found themselves on the bubble. Ionescu called a shove from the big blind for all his chips with the best of it, but…the river delivered one of those aforementioned bad beats. Click here to read all about that hand, or if you haven’t time, just watch the video below.

The other bad river beat came in the hand which we labelled early on as ‘Hand of the Day’. Head here to read about that one in full. Meanwhile, other notables who vanquished through the course of Day 2 action included MonteDam Swing winner Andreas Klatt and online crusher Vladimir Shabalin.

So what comes next? Day 3 of course. The 58 survivors will be back in their seats 1pm Bucharest time tomorrow, all with their eyes on the €133,400 first place prize.

Join us back here then on the PokerStars Blog for more feature coverage from the PokerStars Festival, including the latest news from the €2,200 High Roller. A certain Team Pro by the name of Mr. Moneymaker is playing in that one right now…

Content Credits: https://www.pokerstars.com/

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