World Series of Poker Main Event -- Recap of Days 2A and 2B

Days 2A and 2B of the 2012 World Series of Poker main event are now in the books after playing simultaneously, and separately, today at the Rio. The 657 players who survived day 1A played on in the Amazon Room while the 1,387 who made their way through day 1B did battle in the Brasilia and Pavilion rooms.

After five levels of play today, the 814 players who survived will combine with those who make it through tomorrow’s day 2C. They will join up on Thursday, marking the first time the entirety of the field will be playing together.

The biggest stack at the end of day 2AB belongs to Frenchwoman Gaelle Baumann with 505,800. A number of big names built up sizable stacks as well, including 2010 Card Player Online Player of the Year Taylor Paur (391,600), Matthew Woodward (381,000), Vanessa Selbst (350,400), Jason Somerville (332,700) Eugene katchalov (330,900), Gavin Smith (279,100) and Daniel Negreanu (277,200). One of the biggest stacks of all belonged to Shaun Deeb, who ended the night as the third largest stack with 460,900.

“Yeah I ended up busting a few 30 to 50k stacks. I hero called one or two of them, made a few top pairs, and then just won a standard flip. It seemed quick,” said Deeb with a laugh. “I accumulated 250,000 chips at a 1k big-blind level in like an hour. I won every hand. It was a lot of fun, and nobody believed me.”

Deeb has already had a marquee year in tournaments, winning four events at the Spring Championship of Online poker, finishing sixth in the WSOP $10,000 pot-limit hold’em final table for $84,668 and then finishing second in the $25,300 satellite into the Big One for One Drop for an incredible $1 million payday. But of course, even with all of that success, he still is hungry to put up a result in the main event.

“This is the most important tournament of the year, so putting up a result would be the shining moment of my career, that already has a lot of accolades,” said Deeb. “So that’s my goal, to make the ‘October Nine’ or whatever the catchphrase is this year. Hopefully I bust two people in the same hand and have a massive chiplead in the ‘October Eight.’ That works for me.”

Speaking of people who have already made the main event final table, five prior WSOP main event champions did survive the day including 2011 champion Pius Heinz, 2008 champion Peter Eastgate, 2007 champion Jerry Yang, 2002 champion Robert Varkonyi and 1995 champion Dan Harrington.

Day 2c kicks off at noon PST with the remaining players who started on day 1C. Here is a look at the top twenty chip counts from the end of day 2AB:

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