WPT Champions Club Member Vladimir Bozinovic Leads Final 32 in Sochi

WPT Baden 2013 Champion Vladimir Bozinovic is the chip leader after Day 2

After a marathon day of 14 hours in real-time and nearly 11 and a half full levels, Day 2 of the 2021 WPT Russia Main Event has come to an end. The flagship tournament of the festival comes with a price tag of ₽245,000/$3,328 and 109 players out of 199 entries returned at noon local time to take their seats at the stunning Casino Sochi.

With another four levels of late registration, the new entries and re-entries kept on coming to eventually boost the field to 251 entries. This created a prize pool of  ₽54,247,551/$726,832, which will be split among the top 32 finishers. And that was also the goal for the day, as the action only concluded once the money bubble had burst.

When all was done and dusted, Edgar Martirosyan’s departure gave all remaining contenders a guaranteed min-cash of ₽429,800/$5,757 with the hopes of a lot more than that. And the chip leader at the end of the night already knows what it takes to go all the way in a WPT Main Event.

All the way back in 2013, Serbia’s Vladimir Bozinovic joined the WPT Champion’s Club when he took down the WPT Baden €3,500 Main Event. The field size was very similar back then as well, as 254 entries were recorded in Austria. It was Bozinovic’s first recorded live cash outside of his home country and he made it count for a top prize of €185,000.

Bozinovic finished Day 2 with 890,000 in chips, just one big blind ahead of Maksim Sekretarev (878,000). Alexandr Stepanyuk completes the podium with a stack of 761,000 and Maksim Pisarenko ranks fourth with 731,000. It was Pisarenko that burst the bubble and made 31 opponents happy.

Other notables in the top ten include Aleksandr Merzhvinskiy (514,000), Aleksey Savenkov (484,000), and Sergey Konovalov (435,000). Last year’s High Roller champion here at Casino Sochi, Garik Tamasyan, is also in the mix with a stack of 206,000. Besides Bozinovic and Siarhei Chudapal (65,000), Tamasyan is one of three non-Russians players in the money.

Dmitry Vitkind (130,000) and WPT Online champion Andrey Kotelnikov (122,000) also earned another Russian flag for their poker resume and will be back for Day 3 at noon local time. That’s when the action picks up with 36:46 minutes left in level 20 at blinds of 4,000-8,000 with a big blind ante of 8,000.

Who had to say goodbye on Day 2? There were plenty of big names who failed to make the cut. High Roller crusher Artur Martirosyan was among the early casualties, re-entered and still busted soon after the registration had closed. Some other Casino Sochi regulars and notables of the international circuit that came up short today were Anatoliy Korochenskiy, Andrey Andreev, Gleb Tremzin, Pavel Kovalenko, Denis Pisarev, Oleg Titov, Anatolii Zyrin, and Vlada Stojanovic to name all but a few.

Maxim Lykov, WSOP and EPT Main Event winner, missed his chance to have a shot at the elusive Triple Crown and departed before the final five tables were set. Suddenly, the action slowed down significantly and the nearby bubble dominated the decisions. Danilo Velasevic and Aleksandar Tomovic crashed out, then defending champion Aleksey Badulin ran out of chips only a few spots away from a min-cash.

Eventually, it was Martirosyan who was forced all-in out of the blinds and his suited ace-eight ended up second-best to the pocket queens of Pisarenko.

That’s all for the night but the WPT.com team will be back tomorrow to provide updates for the penultimate tournament day. The 32 contenders will be whittled down to the final six for the live-streamed final table on Sunday, February 28.