Although the poker focus in the United Kingdom this weekend has naturally fallen on the International Stadiums Poker Tour at Wembley, there have been other places to play poker. The GUKPT series has been going from strength to strength this year and the latest event, held in Portsmouth, has done very well for itself. The numbers at Wembley may not quite be adding up with respect to meeting the price money but at Portsmouth, it turns out that there is a great level of demand with the number of players exceeding the initial expectations. This is great news and should help to spur the players on to higher levels of play.
Day 1a is traditionally a slow day at these event, which don’t really pick up until the weekend but there were 50 entrants taking part in the day’s poker activities. From this amount, 23 players managed to grab chips and the leader at the end of Day 1a was Morgan Sorfleet. Morgan had managed to turn his initial stack of 20,000 chips into just short of 100,000 which left him as the leader. He may not have too many cash victories to his name in live poker play but with this sort of form, that will surely change at some point soon.
Plenty of poker action to go
Other notable players at the higher end of the standings for Day 1a were Alvarez Sabugal, who had 70,300 chips and Nick Humphris who had 76,600. In second place at the end of Day 1a was Clive Macey who collected 82,050 chips.
Day 1b was even busier at the G-Casino in Portsmouth as 84 players came along to play for glory and the cash. The leader of this day’s poker was Chris Gordon who turned his opening stack of 20,000 chips into 101,775. This was enough to take the lead in the tournament up to this point and like Morgan Sorfleet, Gordon would have hopes and expectations of going far in this event.
Other notable players at the higher end of the standings for Day 1b were Trevor Davies, who had 89,000 chips and Paul Dunne, who had 94,400. Just edging Dunne out was Blair Hampton, who picked up 94,800 chips to take second place on Day 1b. Day 2 of the GUKPT Portsmouth event started with 55 players and was going all the way through until 9 players were left to create a final table.