Event 1: Possible Chop in Progress

The final nine players return from break in Event 1 ($350 No-Limit Hold’em) to find increased blinds of 200,000-400,000 and a 50,000 ante. The average stack is about 7.5 million, worth about 18 big blinds.

Before play began, they started talking about possible deals. Everyone counted up their chip stacks and entered the numbers into an ICM calculator to look at a possible chop scenario.

Here are the updated chip counts from the table:

Seat 1.  Derek Buonano  –  15,400,000 (38 bb)
Seat 2.  David Diaz  –  5,750,000 (14 bb)
Seat 3.  Daniel Navarrete  –  3,875,000 (9 bb)
Seat 4.  Jeff Yeh  –  4,675,000 (11 bb)
Seat 5.  John Liu  –  7,800,000 (19 bb)
Seat 6.  Kevin Ho  –  3,600,000 (9 bb)
Seat 7.  Zack Goodman  –  8,125,000 (20 bb)
Seat 8.  Steven McKoy  –  9,850,000 (24 bb)
Seat 9.  Jaime Campos  –  8,150,000 (20 bb)

And here are the ICM calculations:

1st:  Derek Buonano  –  $81,702
2nd:  Steven McKoy  –  $66,388
3rd:  Jaime Campos  –  $60,302
4th:  Zack Goodman  –  $60,206
5th:  John Liu  –  $58,940
6th:  David Diaz  –  $50,046
7th:  Jeff Yeh  –  $44,626
8th:  Daniel Navarrete  –  $40,162
9th:  Kevin Ho  –  $38,530

Note: All of these numbers and calculations are still unofficial.

There is talk about modifying the pure ICM calculations a bit, because Buonano has such a big chip lead and would like $90,000, and another player or two are still uncertain.