The two starting days and Day 2 are now history and the player field has been narrowed down from 477 to 116 players. Unfortunately, Day 2 saw the departure of many former EPT champions: Jake Cody, Anton Wigg, Michael Eiler, Arnaud Mattern, Michael Tureniec and David Vamplew etc. However, one former EPT champion is leading the way into Day 3.
Mike "Timex" McDonald (picture), a Canadian poker pro who won EPT German Open in Dortmund in 2008, must have bribed the poker gods (or perhaps the dealers?) since he was running so extremely good throughout Day 2. When he had good hands - he always got paid off very well. When he didn't have good hands and needed luck - the turn and river cards performed magic.
"Basically my big hands were getting paid off and when I didn't have big hands and they had big hands I was sucking out. The last day and a half I've just won pretty much every pot I've been in so it's been going exactly according to plan," McDonald said in an interview with PokerStars after Day 2.
Now you might think that luck is the main reason he's in the lead. And yes, that might be the case . But one need so much more than luck to score in so many big tournaments as McDonald has done in his relatively short poker career.
Apart from winning EPT German Open in Dortmund in 2008 at 18 years of age, he won the AUD$1,000 PokerPro NLH preliminary event at the Aussie Millions and finished second in another preliminary event the same year.
Then we should not forget about his 5th place finish in Dortmund in 2009, a 3rd place finish in EPT Deauville, a 4th place in WPT Venice, and he became the youngest person to win an event on the Epic Poker League in September last year. As of September, 2011, his total live tournament winning exceed $3,6 million!
Day 3 of EPT Madrid will kick off in a few hours time. We will return with an update tomorrow morning!
TOP 5 players:
Mike McDonald 409800
Frederik Jensen 40450
Dmitry Vitkind 368000
Andries Swart 339100
Javier Etayo 329400
