Just 12 players remain in the hunt for the Eureka3 Croatia title, the €64,000 frist prize, the trophy and the right to call themselves a champion.
Leading the final dozen when play resumes tomorrow will be Theodoros Aidonopoulos, the Greek player was the only player to break the one million chip barrier and finished on 1,118,000. He's something of an EPT regular, having cashed in four main events and his biggest lifetime cash of $216,503 came when he finished second in a €2,000 side event at EPT San Remo in 2008. He led for much of the latter part of the day and you suspect he's going to hard to shift from the top of the chip charts.
In contrast the man who leads the chasing pack didn't assume that position to the final three hands had been called and the clock paused as the day wound down. Zoltan Gonczo then got that dream set up of aces against the kings of Alberto Fiorilla. He started and stayed in front of them (and a short stacked Triantafyllos Chadiroglou's pocket sevens) and when the chips had been passed to him he found he had 802,000 of them.
That took him above another Hungarian and the man who had, before Aidonopoulos took charge, led the way. Bozso Achilles was a fearsome presence at the felt all day, relaxed, calm and, one suspects, ready to put his 728,000 stack to good use.
Such is the size of Aidonopoulos's stack that only one other player finished the day with an above average stack and they might know each other as Georges Yazbeck is also a regular fixture on the EPT. He had a good Day 1 and followed it up with a solid Day 2 to finish on 538,000. You can see the counts of all remaining players here.
When the Day began there were 103 players of whom 40 would get paid. Before the money kicked in though we lost Team PokerStars Pro Matti De Meulder, Full Tilt Poker Ambassador Robert Cezarescu and Day 1 chip leader Christian Kolke.
They all picked up the same as bubble boy Mario Karmen though, his pocket nines downed by the pocket tens of Daniel Ebersold and just like that we were in the money. So far 28 players have cashed but crashed out of this tournament. Chief amongst them are Team PokerStars Pro Dag Palovic who ran ace-queen into ace-king to bust in 22nd and Eureka2 Bulgaria winner Petar Zografov who grinded a short stack all day only to lose with ace-king to pocket sevens and bust in 16th. A full list of pay outs can be found here.
To catch up with today's hand for hand updates click here but until tomorrow it's good night from Dubrovnik.
All photos are copyright of Ivan Dabac.