Day 2A at the WSOP Main Event has just finished and one of the poker superstars with a good stack at the end of the day was Patrik Antonius. Our flying reporter bet-a-pot met up with Antonius to hear his comments about the day and his WSOP in general.


Antonius has approximately 258k at the end of Day 2A, good for more than 250bb when the players return on Monday. Most of it came in a big hand on the last level. Antonius explains:

"I raised with 53 suited in late position, and the small blind re-raised but he had a lot behind and he raised so small that I decided to see the flop in position. Flop came 853, he bet, I raised a little, he shoved. It was a 200k pot. He had aces. Turn was a king which gave him more outs (for a better two pair) but the river was a jack. After that hand I lost about 20k before the day ended."

Antonius has played only one event in this series before the Main Event. He says he doesn't see any value in tournaments for him right now.

"I played just the $50k 8-game event (The Players' Championship) before this one. Mostly I have been playing just the cash games. Tournament poker doesn't suit me at the moment mainly because of my lifestyle. I don't want to sit at the Rio all day long. I should be making some big sidebets if I wanted to have more value at tournaments compared to cash games. Cash is were I'm most likely to make big money."

How have the cash games at Bobby's Room been this summer?

"Not half as good as last year," Patrik says. "In 2009 the games were the best I have ever seen."

While Antonius has never been too interested in tournaments, he is in 2nd place at the all time money list for Finnish players with $2.86 million (behind only Juha Helppi who has $2.93 million). His biggest cash ($1.0 million) came for 2nd place at the WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic back in 2005, and that same year he won the EPT Baden and came 3rd at EPT Barcelona. At the WSOP he has 12 cashes, three of them at final tables.

The chip counts for Day 2A are not published yet, but Antonius is near the top with a 258k stack. We will have full results later but other players doing well at the latest chip counts include Cole South, Johnny Chan, Robert Mizrachi, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, Sam Farha, and Michael Mizrachi, who all had more than 200k.

(In the picture, a true rarity: Patrik Antonius smiles at a poker table!)