This morning, on the three-block walk from my hotel to the Tivoli Hotel, the venue for the 2013 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Brazil Main Event, I passed a ten-strong motorcycle gang wearing leather jackets that had something to say about omertà, "the categorical prohibition of cooperation with state authorities"; a child juggling in the street for spare coins; and a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. I was also asked for directions in Portuguese, a language that I speak about as well as I speak High Valyrian.
It has been a full morning.
Nonetheless, there's still much more to come as Day 1b of the Main Event begins to take shape. Yesterday's field combined for 295 entries, roughly on par with the number of entries on Day 1a of the LAPT's last stop in Viña del Mar, Chile. Day 1b of that tournament, you may recall, produced roughly double the number of entries as Day 1a. LAPT staff are expecting some big things here this afternoon.
75 players made it through the day yesterday. As we approached the end of the last level of the night, it appeared that Brazilian Francesco Conte was going to be the overnight chip leader. But there was this guy on the feature table that you may have heard of. He's a guy who's won an LAPT or two in his life and a guy I mistakenly reported as an eliminacão yesterday.
Say hello to two-time LAPT champion, Team PokerStars Pro and Day 1a chip leader Jose "Nacho" Barbero.
"Rounding into form" doesn't even begin to describe Barbero's poker game the last few months. In November, he made the final table of the LAPT Season 5 Grand Final in Peru. He finished 6th. Last month, at the Season 6 opener in Chile, he had the chip lead with three players left as he tried to secure his third LAPT title. The cards didn't fall his way, however. He finished 3rd.
Since then, he made the final table of a $500,000 guarantee event in Panama (9th), then the next day went out and won FTOPS XXII Event #20, a $322 NLH re-entry event. The win was worth $166,000.
"If Nacho makes the final table again, people are going to stop showing up to LAPT events!" joked my PokerStars colleague Sergio Prado.
Barbero is definitely a dangerous man right now. The good news for Day 1b players is that they won't have to face him today. The bad news is that busking isn't going to increase their stacks, and for those that survive the day the path to Day 3 probably lies through Barbero's table at some point tomorrow.
First things first, as my grandmother liked to say. We need to get Day 1b players in their seats and playing poker before we can worry about Day 2. That will happen at 2pm local time (GMT-3), about an hour from now. Like their Day 1a counterparts yesterday, today's players will play ten full levels. Players who make it through the day will bag up at about 2am local time and then will come back tomorrow to juggle Barbero, Hell's Angels and whatever other assortment of peculiarities São Paulo throws at them.
Just no more mimes, please. They're too weird.
Dave Behr is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.
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