Flight 1B of the June edition of the Playground 200 has just wrapped up, or rather bagged up.

No fewer than 138 entries made their way to the felt.  At the end of level 14, 28 players remained, thus securing a seat for Saturday’s Day 2.

The action was all over the page tonight.  Long periods of grinding were followed by a succession of rapid-fire executions, before dwindling down to a grind fest again.

Harley Stoffmaker got off to an early lead before handing over the pole position to Sébastien “Seabass” Poitras who had managed to build his stack up to three times the average mid-point into the flight.  But Seabass had a menacing foe right behind him: Alex Bédard-Poudrier.  Only 12,000 chips separated the two players at this point.  As soon as the action resumed after 8 levels, Alex gave pretty much every player at his table a good run for their money, winning virtually every all-in he got involved in.  This positive streak catapulted him into the first slot of the leaderboard by the time the 12th level started.

As we were witnessing the last few minutes of play before the bags came out, one hand caught our attention on table #34.  Three players were all-in: Seabass, Steve Pouliot and Colin Sheckman.  The three players had tabled their hands.

Seabass:

Steve:

Colin:

As soon as the board was revealed, Colin and Seabass knew they were in trouble because Pouliot had gotten an ideal flop and it just got better and better for him…

Board:

Holding the nuts and in one swift strike, Pouliot sent Colin to the rail in 29th place, did some pretty bad damage to Seabass’s stack, and scooped up enough chips to secure him the chip leader position for this evening, with 313,500 chips.  He’s right behind Michel Gariepy who bagged a whopping 339,000 chips this afternoon in flight Day 1A.  David Lanthier, who bagged 302,000 chips, is the only other player to have passed the 300K mark tonight.

So now the 28 sealed bags are on their way to the Playground vault to join the other 34 bags already in there.

There is still time to get into Event #1 action.  Tomorrow, Friday June 28th, there are two Day 1 flights.  Day 1C gets underway at 11:00am and Day 1D, the final flight, starts at 7:00pm.  In both cases, players have until the beginning of level 7 to register, roughly 2:15 minutes after the tournament start.  Day 2 of this 3-day event is on Saturday June 29th at 1:00pm and Day 3 will be on Sunday, June 30th, at 12:00pm.

To see the combined Day 1 results, click here.

Day 1B chip leader: Steve Pouliot