Paino and Jordanou in Contention at WSOP

Posted at 21:32 2010-07-02

With only a handful of bracelets up for grabs, Tony Paino is in pole position to claim the Aussies’ first bracelet at the World Series of Poker.  Towards the last few hands of play of Day 1, Paino surged to the top of the leader board in the $10,000 Pot Limit Omaha Championship event.  The chip lead of 240,000 that Paino will take into Day 2 was largely thanks to a massive hand where he stacked both Frank Kassela and Joao Barbosa.

Last year Van Marcus final tabled this Championship event as well as the $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha, however Marcus has no chance of reaching such heights this time around, after busting in the first few levels of play.

Another Aussies still alive in the field include Jeff Lisandro, Rob Campbell and Jamie Pickering. Rayan Nathan, Gary Benson and Jason Pritchard were also amongst the elite field, however busted towards the latter half of day's play. 170 players return tomorrow as the overnight leader board looked like this:

1	Tony Paino	240,000
2	Dimitry Stelmak	226,000
3	James Akenhead	181,100
4	Felix Gubitz	178,600
5	Mikhail Smirnov	169,800
6	Fabrice Soulier	151,200
7	Ted Lawson	140,000
8	Noah Boeken	114,400
9	Annette Obrestad	106,900
10	Tom Dwan	103,800

In other Aussie news around the Rio, it was another WSOP cash, this time in the $25,000 No-Limit Hold’em Six-Handed Event for Billy Jordanou. The always colourful Jordanou snuck into the money, sitting 17th out of 18 at end of day's play. Jordanou is now guaranteed a minimum of $58,699 in the prestigious event. John Juanda bubbled the $25K and moved straight on to take a look at his first hand in the $10K PLO (with under an hour's play left to be played out there). Can he build his shrinking starting stack back up the ranks? More importantly can the Aussies stay on top?

The answers will be found tomorrow, when Day 2 of the $10K PLO kicks off at 3PM local Vegas time.  Follow the live coverage on PokerNews.com.