The Aussie Millions Poker Championship attracts stars from all around the world, but the biggest stars of them all are of course our Team PokerStars Pros!
Liv Boeree was a Day 1a casualty, but we had two more red spades in the Main Event field for Day 1b.
Celina Lin was fresh off a deep run in the Bounty side event yesterday, and she hoped to continue that form into the Main Event, but sadly she was an early casualty.
Lin was first crippled when her pocket aces were cracked by an opponent who held straight and flush draws, before she got her last chips in with ace-ten but failed to get past her opponent’s ace-king.
That left Singaporean Bryan Huang as the last Team PokerStars Pro in the Day 1b field.
Huang has been in Melbourne for some of the Aussie Millions side events, but hadn’t had much luck during the week.
“I bubbled a couple of events, but I really enjoyed playing the mixed games in the schedule,” said Huang. “If you’re playing every day, it makes a nice change to playing Holdem every day!”
Things seem to be running a little better in the Main Event for Huang. Early in the day, he benefited from his opponent “misclicking” when accidentally betting the wrong denomination chips. His opponent tossed out two 5k chips instead of 1k chips, which allowed Huang to get his ace-king in against ten-nine for a nice double up.
The run good for Huang even continued during the dinner break, when he found himself seated next to tennis superstar Maria Sharapova at Koko’s restaurant here at Crown Melbourne.
So star struck seated near @mariasharapova grigordimitrov and tomasberdych at #KoKo dinner break for… //t.co/VR98DgLIeO
— Bryan Huang (@BryanHuang_) January 26, 2015
Rumours are that Sharapova was tweeting about being seated next to Huang as well.
Sharapova is already through to the quarters in the Australian Open, but Huang is still in Round 1 here of the Aussie Millions. The good news is that he’s looking a good chance to reach Round 2.
Huang has found some Sharapova-esque grunt and chipped up nicely to around 60,000 heading towards the final levels of the day.
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One player who Celina Lin had to contend with today was 2014 breakout star Simon Deadman who spoke to PokerStars.tv hostess Sarah Herring earlier in the day:
